commercial tech + design is the dumbest cult

Here's Brian Chesky at the Config 2023 conference for Figma, the current designated software for drawing pictures, talking about design at his "design-led company" airbnb.

Brian Chesky went to design school, studied industrial design, and worked as an industrial designer before founding airbnb. They talk to him here as some kind of hero as the only designer ceo in the fortune 500. It's truly sad that this guy is held up as a model for "design" when airbnb does all the things it does.

This cult is based on a reductionist view of design being form alone. Relegating function to being a business and engineering concern.

A room full of UX designers should be grilling the shit out of brian.

From my blog:

In November 2022, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, began a tweet thread with “I’ve heard you loud and clear” in response to a customer backlash over the way they hid additional costs till the checkout page. “You feel like prices aren’t transparent…starting next month, you’ll be able to see the total price you’re paying up front” he said about a change that could be made urgently in a day, or carefully over a few.

When he said I’ve heard you loud and clear he was also telling his User Experience (UX) researchers and designers they were ignored, if they were heard at all. The dark pattern was no mistake. Intentionally designed to deceive and benefit from excited holiday planners and their potential to give in to the sunk cost fallacy. Instead of addressing the ridiculous additional fees the company chose to trick customers into paying them. That’s not empathy, at best it’s apathy, at worst it’s hate. The decision to fix it only came after the balance of business value and public relations started to tip the wrong way. Chesky presented himself as a model CEO doing right by his customers as if he wasn’t responsible for wronging them in the first place. People bought it too. He demonstrated how bright a performative aura of care can shine to hide questions about the business activity or even questions about the business’s legitimacy to exist.

consider this 👆 at the 12:20 mark when the audience applauds him for talking about how design helped them recover from a break-even to a 4bill free cash flow last year - saying they did it by designing the company with "fewer parts, fewer projects" - which probably refers to the ~1900 people they laid off mid-pandemic?