Compassionate Design, Career Advice and Leaving 18F with Designer Ethan Marcotte

Ethan Marcotte is a web designer who may be best known for coining the term “responsive design” in 2010 – which turned out to be a prescient manifesto for the quest to design beautiful, accessible, and effective digital experiences everywhere. Ethan’s also a compassionate web designer and a prolific writer. His most recent book is “You Deserve A Tech Union,” a treatise on the rise of the labor movement in tech.

Ethan also recently spent nearly a year working for 18F, a governmental digital consulting office that helped federal agencies use technology to better serve the public. Ethan resigned in February, just one month before the office was shut down.

In this episode, Ethan describes the difficult choice to leave 18F –  a story that includes practical career advice on what to do when a job contradicts your personal values. He also discusses the role of compassionate design in this moment, and what its future might be. And Ethan reflects on the state of “responsive design” 15 years later, why redesigning big systems requires patience and how AI is changing  the value of our labor. 

“I would love to live in a world where I could be excited about what [AI] produces,” Ethan explains. “But on a personal level, I have a lot of ethical and moral concerns about how the data that they were trained on was acquired…There's a lot that's fraught there. At the same time, I do worry about what our reliance on these systems is going to do to the value of our labor over time. I do feel like we're in the process of de-skilling ourselves by working with these systems. And that's something I think a lot about, what the value of design is now compared to where it's going to be in five years time.”

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On this season of DB|BD, we are Designing for the Unknown. Host Ellen McGirt asks visionary designers how they navigate uncertainty- whether it be technological disruption, global crises, or shifting cultural norms.

Ethan’s website.

Ethan’s essays “Moving on from 18F” and “Hallucinating”

Sylvia Harris: AIGA 2014 Medalist

Jessica Helfand’s beautiful tribute to Sylvia.

Transcript

Ellen McGirt So I’ve been thinking about government a lot lately. I bet you have too. And not just because Elon Musk’s DOGE has forced a painful national conversation about what government is and should do and what efficiency is or isn’t. Now I won’t comment on Mr. Musk specifically because, well, who knows what he’ll be saying or doing when this episode drops. But it was Jessica Helfand, co-founder of Design Observer and my intrepid partner who was the first person to encourage me to think more deeply about the power of design to make governments and civic systems work more effectively. She introduced me to the story of Sylvia Harris, a graphic designer turned educator, inclusion thinker, and design strategist who later in her career focused on helping big systems, hospitals, universities, and civic agencies through processes that would help them craft new policies and innovations and serve the needs of more people. Here’s just one example: as the creative director of the U.S. Census 2000, she redesigned forms and materials specifically to boost participation among underrepresented groups, and she succeeded. That census had a response rate of 67%, which doesn’t sound like much until you learn that the expected response rate was just 61%. She was among the first to put real people in the center of the design process, Jessica taught me. Sylvia went on to carve out an entirely new focus in design, design for the public good, citizen-centered design, and coined the phrase public information design. So Sylvia was on my mind when I began following the news of the DOGE cuts, and very particularly when I stumbled upon this extraordinary post by designer Ethan Marcotte recounting his experience at 18F. Now 18F was the digital services agency within the technology transformation services, which among other things, developed open source tools to improve digital services across the government. It was a decade old and DOGE eliminated it in March. He described it as a designer’s dream job, surrounded by a team who were open, curious, kind and creative, and dedicated to building better products to serve their clients, the government, and by default, many of us. “I know it sounds pat,” he wrote, “but 18F was one of the best places I’ve ever worked until it wasn’t and I felt I had to leave.” Ethan has been thinking deeply about the power of design for much longer than his brief tenure at 18F. Some 15 years ago, he coined the term Responsive Design, which turned out to be a prescient manifesto for the quest to design beautiful, accessible, and effective digital experiences everywhere. Recently, he wrote what I consider to be a must-read, You Deserve a Tech Union, a well-researched treatise on the rise of the labor movement in tech. I’m glad he’s thinking all the big things through. I’m Ellen McGirt and this is the Design of Business|Business of Design. This season, we’re designing for the unknown. In this episode, we are responding to an uncertain world. That’s you, Ethan. How are you? 

Ethan Marcotte Oh, feeling emotional in the first minute of the podcast. That’s got to be a good sign. Ellen, it’s really wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

Ellen McGirt Oh, I’m so glad. I am so very glad. It’s good to have you here. The power of the wandering around the web and I found you and I found your post. I do want to talk to you a little bit about that. But I want to just get to know you a bit first if that’s okay with you. 

Ethan Marcotte Yeah, that’s great. So yeah, I mean, I think you covered all the bases, but I am a designer living and working in Boston, Massachusetts, or just outside of it. I’ve been working for myself for most of my career since the late 90s. I’ve gone in-house a number of times, but for the most part, yeah, just working as an independent designer. I’ve worked on redesigns and ground-up designs for places like the Boston Globe, the Sundance Film Festival, New York Magazine, couple of large tech companies you’ve probably heard of. And yeah, I think about 15 years ago when I coined the term Responsive Design, I was a little surprised at the reception and kind of how it overtook my design practice because I think there was this real need in the marketplace for folks to think a little bit more flexibly about how to design experiences that could be accessed anywhere on any kind of device or any kind screen. And I think I just lucked into writing the right article at the time. So, that was pretty much most of my design work falling on for the next decade or so, and then started getting a little bit more into working with larger teams and helping them think about design systems and shipping design at scale. And then more recently talking about the way in which the work of design’s been changing. So writing a little more about labor and what it means to work in design in 2025. And anyway, a lot of that work and sort of like watching the labor movement in tech grow, over a number of years in watching people organize their workplaces and form unions. I mean, that was sort of like the impetus for writing my last book was trying to make sense of this growing movement of designers and engineers and practitioners and what it meant for them to organize and trying to make that accessible to more people. So, it is an incredible honor to be here today. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’m so glad you reached out, Ellen. 

Ellen McGirt Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. To me, you very much are part of a line of design thinking and design caring and really thinking through things that Sylvia Harris exemplifies so well. And I’m curious where you think, given the scope of your inquiry and the amount of time you spend thinking about both design, the world, business, and the marketplace for ideas and talents, whether the kind of designer that you are or your colleagues were, particularly at 18F, still has a role to play in business today?

Ethan Marcotte Yeah, wow, that is a great question. I’m glad we’ve got three hours scheduled for this call. 

Ellen McGirt Take all the time you need, you’re going to get a Nobel Prize at the end of this. 

Ethan Marcotte Oh my gosh, all right, well now I’m definitely leaving. But no, it’s a big question, and I think it’s it’s hard year to be asking that question because I think like I joined 18F because I’ve always looked for opportunities where the things that I care about in the world kind of overlap with my professional opportunities, right? To try to bring some skills to bear on problems that I think are worth solving. And the folks at 18F I think were doing that and had been doing that for a long time, like, they’d been involved prior to me joining, you know, making government work better for people. And, you know, they’d be involved with projects like the IRS direct file program that I think might have gotten some news recently where, you actually for the very first time, like being able to file your taxes directly with the federal government and doing so in a way that was intuitive, easy to use, like not having to like get some convoluted off the shelf software. This really complicated process trying to make it digestible and accessible to people. It was really kind of amazing to watch from the outside. And then, you know, trying to make properties like weather.gov more accessible. I mean, these were folks who were involved in like not just designing and building better services themselves, but also trying to help train other parts of the federal government to talk to users more frequently or earlier in the process, to try to fail quickly as possible, you know, early on in the process to learn better from the things they’re designing. Um, so they were, they weren’t just like showing how to do better work. They’re trying to teach others how to better work and, um, when the opportunity came up to, uh, throw my hat in the ring for a job there, I was, I was excited to do it and I was excited to get that job. But yeah, getting back to your question. I mean, I, I got a few months into that job and I was thinking I’d be there for years. And now, um now that I’ve left federal service, I do find myself like, what is the role of compassionate design right now? Because civic technology in 2025 looks a lot different than it did 12 months ago. It’s folks building surveillance technology and thinking about ways to build databases on American citizens. And I don’t know what the role of compassion is in design right now I’d like to see that future. And I think there are people thinking about what that future is. But, you know, it’s a weird, scary time for designers right now, I think. 

Ellen McGirt It is. One of the things that was extraordinary about your post was that it was a powerful piece of career advice in disguise. And you walked through your process to decide whether you would stay or go, and on what terms those were. And that, to me, struck me as courageous, thoughtful, but also universally good advice for anybody who’s purpose-driven, empathy-driven, team-oriented, stakeholder-oriented in any environment. Could you walk us through that, please? 

Ethan Marcotte I’d love to and credit where credit’s due, this was advice that was given to me at the end of last year when I was frankly in panic mode because I didn’t know how much longer I could sort of stay in this job with the results of the election and just kind of wondering how that was going to change the work I was able to do. And so a friend of mine basically said things are calm right now, so the best thing you can do for yourself while things are calm is to write down some lines you don’t want to cross. Like just doing a values assessment, try to understand what are the things you care about. If those are taken away from you, maybe articulating them when you’re in calmer water is going to be easier than when you are in a panic mode. So I wrote down a bunch of things. I was really grateful for that advice. And the three that I kind of came down to in that post were, I need remote work. Like just for some various factors, like that’s something I need. So if that was gonna change, and the new administration was making noise about that changing, like that would be a potential red line. The second line was, you know, a little bit more directly values-based, which was if I was asked to work on a project that could be used to arm or surveil people. And 18F, to its credit, I think had a long history of like making sure that they were never putting work in front of people that didn’t line up with what they cared about or what they felt comfortable contributing to. So I wasn’t worried about that from 18F standpoint, but didn’t know if that might change at some point. And then the third one was whether or not if I was ever asked to meet with someone who didn’t work for the government and being asked to discuss what I did for work. And that was more or less driven by, well, the gentleman you named in your intro had been making a lot of noise about like reforming the government and making it more efficient and improving tech modernization at the federal government level. And because of his involvement, I was pretty sure that he was going to be, um, well, essentially just rerunning the same playbook he used when he took over Twitter, where he started bringing employees from other companies that he owned and, uh, they were sort of interrogating folks who worked at Twitter to kind of defend why they still needed a job. Come end of January, and again, I wrote this all down thinking I’d have like months of time, right? Because the federal government historically has moved very slowly, but you know, whoops, I’m in the future now. But then I got, so basically like some of the folks coming in had associations with some of the companies that this gentleman has owned and does own. And I got an appointment dropped on my calendar to meet with one of these new administrators to talk about my work. And then I started hearing from other folks in Slack who’d had some of these interviews that they weren’t in fact meeting with the director who was starting these interviews and that they were meeting with people who either wouldn’t disclose their names or wouldn’t give their last names or wouldn’t even say where they worked in government. So, you know, all these images like shadowy figures kind of coming to mind at this point. So when I got my invitation, you know, one of my lines was getting crossed, basically. I was pretty sure that I was gonna be asked to meet with somebody from outside of government and sort of talk about why I deserve to have a job. And so given that, I basically had to do like a quick like, a quick bit of calculus because I was at the time still considered a probationary employee. I hadn’t been there a full year. So there were a whole bunch of like civil service protections that weren’t available to me at that point. So, If I refused to take the interview, that could be seen as insubordination. I could be asked to leave. Um, and I also wasn’t allowed because of some weird bureaucratic stuff, um, to be part of a union. Like my job is classified in a way that didn’t give me additional protections at work. I basically, um, realized that I think my best option was to withhold my labor, basically to, to resign my job. I met with my supervisor and handed him my two weeks notice. I got to tell you, it’s still, it is not a decision I’m ever going to feel great about because it was a great place to work with good people. I was only there for eight months and it was fantastic. I felt like I was doing good work and contributing to some things that were important and still sad to leave and still sad that the organization is not there because those folks are fantastic. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, I’m so sorry. 

Ethan Marcotte Yeah, thanks, Ellen. 

Ellen McGirt Thank you for walking us through it. That is, it really strikes me in an uncertain world that is great advice to know who you are, what your lines are, to do a values assessment, as you put it, before you walk forward. And because when things do get crazy, those touchstones really do help. I thought it was exceptional. So thank you for walk me through, as painful as it was. I do want to talk about more philosophically what you’ve learned about transformation and innovation in big systems. Because, you know, part of what hangs in the air is that people don’t think that big systems can’t transform or change. They don’t believe it. We believe whatever we believe about corporations. We believe what we believe about big government. But in fact, you and I know that doesn’t necessarily have to be true. What have you learned about big systems who are transforming themselves? 

Ethan Marcotte Man, that’s a wonderful question, Ellen. I think prior to joining government, a lot of my work was actually consulting with large organizations who were trying to find a better way to connect with their customers. And primarily from the design side for me, but just how that informed the way that they talked to and communicated with and published information for their customers, it’s a big thorny problem. And so in my very, very brief time in government, I only saw some small, small slices of how the federal government worked. On the two projects that I worked on, I mean, the civil servants that I interacted with, the software teams that I interacted with. I mean these were people who were hungry to do a better job for American citizens, right? Like the last project I worked on, which was very short, just in terms of, in terms of the timing of my departure, was a project of the Department of the Interior who were this small team that was basically like tracking. The progress of restoring natural disaster sites, basically. So think Exxon Valdez, there’s remediation processes that are going into place. And so this is information that the American citizenry has paid for and deserves access to, and they’re trying to make it more accessible to them. But starting from a mission-driven standpoint of we could do this better and trying to understand all the steps between that and a more successful designed solution or product, You know, that’s where, like, 18F would come in and help them build a better map of how to get from point A to point B. I will say that as big as those systems are, the solutions that we worked on were very small and iterative, like trying to start from a hypothesis and trying to ask a question about like, oK, well, if we did x a little bit differently, how would that impact the system at large? Or what could we potentially do better if that does work or doesn’t work? So trying with very minimum viable approaches to certain design solutions. And getting them in front of users, in front of stakeholders, and asking some hard questions. And then slowly, over time, building up a solution from there was how the teams that I worked with worked. And that seemed just incredibly successful. So I don’t know. Your question about big systems, I think a lot of the best systems get built up over time very slowly. Yes. And I don’t know, I’ve always been a big fan of that more emergent approach. 

Ellen McGirt You know, every time something goes wrong in the world, someone shares that meme, SysAdmin in Front of Server, and it’s like a server going crazy with all these wires, and there’s a person with their hands on their hips staring at it. And it’s, like, this is a sign that things are messed up and nothing’s gonna be working in this big system or government or something goes down. But actually, what you just described and what I actually think is that person who’s staring into the mess of wires is the innovator because they’re the ones who know how everything works. And what you just described as straightforward as it sounds is like get everybody who touches the machine together and innovate together and iterate together and iteration is innovation. That is a really hard thing to sell. 

Ethan Marcotte It is a hard thing to sell because I think like, and this gets back to the other point about like tech modernization and the federal government, like, I think there’s this impulse to sort of see like a better designed interface or a better version of some sort of software is like that’s gonna fix something. But these systems are made up of people who do the work, who understand these systems and like centering them and asking them what they need and how they work, understanding how they work that’s often like. That’s where a good solution comes from. But yeah, that’s a much harder sell. 

Ellen McGirt It is. Well, it doesn’t sound like it’ll land you on the cover of a magazine like all of these tech folks really want to be like the great man who fixed the thing, but actually it’s a great team who worked at it over time and then woke up and one day everything was improved. 

Ethan Marcotte Yeah, yeah, exactly. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Yeah. 

Ellen McGirt Well, actually, you did kind of say it. So I’m just repeating back what I’ve learned from you. Speaking of which, I want to go back to Responsive Design a little bit, and we could just dig into what the tech world looked like when you came up with this unified field theory. And 15 years later, what does the world look like now, and how does that term resonate? 

Ethan Marcotte Well, yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think back in 2010, we were just banging sticks together compared to where we are now in a lot of ways. But I really do believe, if I hadn’t come up with the idea, somebody else would have. Because the way we were working back then just wasn’t sustainable. We were sort of approaching every project back then. And this was like 2007, 2008. The iPhone had just come out. And I think Western markets had realized, oh, the mobile web is actually a huge thing. And the rest of the world was like welcome to 10 years ago, but okay. But, you know, now that we actually had to think beyond the desktop, we were doing that in a way of like, just sort of like creating two separate websites all the time. Like there’s a mobile site and a desktop site and good luck trying to keep those two things in sync. So we thankfully around that time had some like newfangled technology that allowed us to think a little bit more flexibly in terms of how we design these layouts. That was usable in a way that it hadn’t been previously. And I’ve been doing a lot of reading around more flexible forms of architecture and creating spaces that could bend and flex and adapt to accommodate different needs for people who are in a room or different sizes of crowds who are in a space. And the thing about the web is, by default, it’s a flexible design medium. As designers, we historically had come to it and we’re like, okay, well, here’s the box. And we’re gonna put all the content and imagery and features inside of the box. But without that constraint, I mean, the web can kind of flow naturally to be on any kind of device by default. So all I was proposing in responsive design was kind of like a little bit of a course correction. Like if we get back to our roots, if we use some of these new technologies to create more flexible layouts, then we can more easily just reach people wherever they are, regardless of what kind of screen they’re using to access our work. The general principles, I think, hold up. If you don’t assume that everyone’s coming to your service or your product with a 30-inch screen and think about all the different screen sizes that could potentially be interacting with your work, that’s going to help you think and design a little bit more flexibly. Yeah, and now it feels like, man, the toys that I get to play with now as a designer is just like, if I’d had them back then, I don’t know what I would have been able to do, but we can do tremendous things and still deliver really compelling experiences to the smallest screen. It feels like science fiction sometimes. 

Ellen McGirt I have to ask you, because I have to ask everybody, I stop them on the street. AI. You have had some very strong things to say about AI. All of AI is an hallucination, you say. 

Ethan Marcotte Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think I got a lot of opinions on the topic, but I did write this post about like, you know, we talk about hallucinations in AI when AI gets something wrong. You know, like that there’s a bunch of famous examples floating around like those Google searches where it’ll tell me tell you how many rocks you’re allowed to put on your pizza every morning or something like that. It’s just like there’s all this nonsense stuff that kind of comes out of these machines but calling those things hallucinations just sort of like assigns to those platforms the ability to tell right from wrong, but that’s kind of fundamentally not really how they work. Like they’re basically all based on spicy statistics, right? Like if you give them a big set of data to train on, and if that data says that all cats are green, then the next time you ask that AI platform, like, what color is a cat? It’s probably going to tell you about the cat’s green. It’s basically just like looking at common patterns, analyzing them and returning what it sees. So that’s really all the point of that little rant was, was that it’s healthier, I think, to think about all this stuff as a hallucination because it’s effectively just, I do tend to think of them as slot machines for text, for imagery, for content. Like they don’t understand right or wrong, they’re just basically like producing data. But yeah, I think generally I do think that as workers, as designers, I have a lot of complicated feelings around AI because I would love to live in a world where I could be excited about what they produce. But I have on a personal level, I have like a lot ethical and moral concerns about how the data that they were trained on was acquired. The environmental costs of AI are pretty significant. It’s still trying to be understood, but still pretty significant, the human costs of producing these platforms is something that doesn’t get talked about enough, like the lower underpaid workers who are training these datasets or scouring them for sensitive content and moderating them and really traumatizing conditions. Like there’s a lot that’s fraught there, but at the same time, I do worry about what our reliance on these systems is gonna do to the value of our labor over time, that I do feel like we’re in the process of de-skilling ourselves by working with these systems. And that’s something I think a lot about, like what the value design is now compared to where it’s gonna be in five years time. 

Ellen McGirt Mmm, how are you preparing yourself for that? 

Ethan Marcotte I wish I had a good answer for that, I think right now it’s just the… 

Ellen McGirt I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think anybody does. But when you mentioned the idea of de-skilling ourselves, it seemed to me that the flip side of that is where can we be shoring up expertise? Where can we shoring confidence? 

Ethan Marcotte That’s a great point. That’s great point, yeah. Thanks, Ellen. I think like, and I use the word de-skilling. It has a couple of different meanings. And I guess the one that I sort of come back to is when we think about automation when it comes to an industry, not even just design, but when factory manufacturing becomes the norm, for example, in the automotive industry. The trend isn’t to replace human labor overnight. It’s a long, slow process. And when automation comes to an industry at first, it’s not that great. It doesn’t really produce anything that’s at the same level as a human laborer. But it’s seen as kind of good enough. So the human labor basically moves into like a supervisory position, like they’re making sure the machine’s doing good work. 

Ellen McGirt Managing the machine, right, right, right.

Ethan Marcotte Exactly, exactly. And I think that kind of describes our relationship with a lot of these platforms right now. We’re sort of moving into that kind of coaching model with a lot of the systems and making sure that the work they produce is okay. And if not, then we’ll tune our prompts and rethink our approach. But that’s the de-skilling process that basically once you’re moved into that kind of supervisory position, you become a little bit more replaceable. And the value of your labor at least by the folks who pay our wages, is seen as a little bit more replaceable and not as valuable. So that’s the process that I kind of worry about that’s happening right now. So the labor piece, at least for me, is like what kind of protections we want at work, work with these systems potentially safely, right? Like if we could protect our wages protect the value of our work, I would have fewer reservations at least about artificial intelligence platforms, but we’re not quite there yet. 

Ellen McGirt So that brings me to You Deserve a Tech Union. Tell us why you wrote the book. And I really cannot recommend it enough, to be honest. It’s so well-researched. I mean, you’re going back into the history of labor movements, many of which I wasn’t familiar with, to pull out a single thread, which is dignity.

Ethan Marcotte That’s that’s really kind of you, Ellen. And thank you for reading it. Thanks for the kind words. I mean, it’s it’s a labor of love. I started writing it back in 2021. And it took about two years to pull together. And a big part of that was because, you know, as I mentioned before, I’m primarily throughout my career, I’ve been an independent designer, I have never been in a union. And so I’m a weird choice to write about unionizing in tech. That was basically triggered to realize that I need to talk to the people that are doing that work. So there’s a lot of interviews, I think upwards of 50 or so people from across the labor movement in tech and talking to them about their experiences in organizing their workplace, forming a union, what they’ve learned, what they wish they’d done differently. And I tried to really center their voices as much as possible. And I learned a lot from them. I learned lot by researching it, like all those histories that were new to you, they were new to me at the time. And I think like one thing that was instructive for me was I started working on the book, thinking about all this organizing happening as somehow new to the tech industry, right? Like this is something that came out of the 2016 elections and folks were realizing that they wanted to have more of a say over how their work was used. But learning that there had been organizing of tech contracted workers back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and that there were folks fighting for racial and gender equity in the 1950s and 60s in tech, you know, I think it was helpful to sort of learn that there’s that rich history there in our industry that we can build on and learn from. But the book was basically just arguing that the future of the tech industry for us individually for myself and for all of us is about getting organized and unionizing and standing together and building protections together and trying to build a better version of tech. That’s where it came from. I’m really proud of the book. It’s a very tiny little read, but I hope it’s been instructive for some folks and helpful for folks. 

Ellen McGirt What was the standout, one or two standout examples of very successful, more recent, technology organization movements in terms of what’s possible? 

Ethan Marcotte The one that still comes to mind is, I don’t know about recent, but it’s from 2018, the Google walkouts were tremendous. I mean, it’s something I think about. This tells you how fun I am at parties. Like I still think of it with some frequency and I guess, but you know, I mean you can still find videos online of 20,000 Google employees like streaming out of their offices one day. And they were doing that in response to an expose that came out of the Times about some heinous behavior that had happened at the executive level, and these folks were fed up. They wanted safer working environments. They wanted accountability at the executive-level, and they wanted a seat at the table. And the thing that I found really remarkable about that is when you look at some flashpoint moment like that, you tend to think of it as something that just spontaneously happened. But in reading more about it and talking to some of the people who were involved. You learn that they’ve been slowly building up that power over the course of about a year and a half, like organizing around other unrelated issues in the workplace, building connections, telling stories to each other, and taking actions together that eventually then built up into something that when this news story broke, they were able to mobilize very quickly. So that’s one of those things that I found just inspiring, but also just like, incredibly educational, that those kinds of connections have to be built up over time, they have to maintained, and when they are and when they do, they can turn into something really powerful. 

Ellen McGirt Well, it sounded to me as I was reading, and it sounds to me as I’m listening to you, is that some version of a collective values assessment has to take place, which is exactly what you did. But as an individual, it’s one thing. But as a diverse group of people who are only united by the project or the company they work for, that work is harder. 

Ethan Marcotte Absolutely, man, Ellen, that’s beautiful and I love that. I think, you know, I talked to a lot of organizers, folks who were basically like, well, for folks who were in the process of forming a union for the very first time, that process, it’s very fuzzy, it is very unclear, but it starts with conversations, like talking to coworkers and looking for those moments of connection between like trying to understand like, what do you like about the job? What do you wish was different? And trying to like how folks can work together to kind of improve those things. And it is a slow, methodical, sometimes frustrating process, but those connections, I think, do translate into something that can really be transformative for an organization. So, I don’t know, I’m thinking again about your very first question about what the future is for compassionate design and tech, and I think that that level of building solidarity and building connections, that’s worth investing in. I think it’s a really hopeful enterprise, and I would love to see more of it. 

Ellen McGirt I want to ask before I have to let you go something that feels a little self-serving to me, but I’m trying to address a bigger problem, a bigger need. You’ve done some design work for some big media clients, New York Magazine, Boston Globe, and I think ProPublica, all of whom I admire greatly. What special needs do media and news sites have in your observation, even if it’s outside the scope of what you were working on? And how do we continue to create relationship with our listeners and our readers, particularly at a time when people just don’t trust what they see, hear, or learn anymore?

Ethan Marcotte That’s a great big question. I’m not sure I have a great big answer for it, but I do think that one of the things that I’m thinking about right now is, and this is my Responsive Design lens probably coming back into play a little bit, but I think that, not even just with news and media brands, but I with any organization, like I think the mobile experience has gotten pushed to the side a little bit in the last five years. I think it’s something that’s still built for and something that still designed for, but one thing that I do see, and this sounds like a small thing, but both teams don’t often look at their work on an actual device. And that’s important when you’re thinking about the fact that we’re trying to reach people who might be on pay-as-you-go mobile plans, who might have a mobile phone that’s maybe five or six years older than the ones that digital teams might have in their pockets. So I think there’s an unacknowledged and maybe an unconscious bias there that because it works on our machines, it’s gonna work everywhere. And I think having a frank conversation about if we are trying to serve people and reach people who may not necessarily fit the mold of the design work that we do on a daily basis, maybe just changing our practices a little bit and trying to make sure that our work actually is going to meet them and serve them as well. 

Ellen McGirt I think that’s very helpful. I hadn’t really thought about the customer, the visitor, the reader, the thinker that is on a different device. So not innovating for the top of the top shelf devices but really innovating for everybody. 

Ethan Marcotte Love that. Yeah, I have family members who are still on dial-up or who are on satellite internet connections in a rural part of a state where I grew up and, you know, if it rains or snows a little too heavily, they can’t get the internet as fast as I can. 

Ellen McGirt Yeah, that’s a good point. Well, God bless them. Now that we’ve had a chance to talk a little bit, I wanted to go back to some of our philosophical points as I let you go back to your amazing responsive life. I’m thinking about the people who are designers, but also leaders, you know, people who consider themselves stakeholders in a bigger conversation about something that’s important to them in the world. What have you learned in your career and is your work as a, as a stakeholder-focused professional to help folks who are facing transitions, professional transitions, think about what’s next in this moment?

Ethan Marcotte I’m gonna bring it back to that values conversation we were having earlier, because I do think that there’s different scales for how design evolves. And it’s really about understanding like how your team defines good design. Those principles are the things that tend to be the foundation that everything else sort of falls out from and they tend to be a lot slower changing systems. So, you know, time and again, whatever I’ve been brought in to help understand requirements for big redesign or help architect a new design system or rethink an existing one, it’s always started with like map making and talking to people about how they work and how product design happens in that organization. And really trying to think about like the principles that they hold dear, the things that they care about. You know, when they talk about whether something was successful or not, like paying attention to that. So I think as an industry and also as individual leaders are facing that transition, I think starting there and trying to understand what are the things you care about as a designer or as a design leader, maybe writing those down, because that exercise was helpful for me very recently. It might be helpful for more folks as well. 

Ellen McGirt Well, I think that’s exactly the right way to go, and I’m also struck by how dangerous, in my opinion, efforts like DOGE are to come in quickly with a blunt instrument to redesign, and that the work of, actual work of redesigning, and we spend a lot of time on that at Design Observer, is relationship-based, it’s patient, it’s thorough, it is rigorous, and it’s kind. 

Ethan Marcotte Yeah, that’s right. There’s a woman named Ursula Franklin who’s been a big influence on me. If you spend like two minutes on my blog, you’re gonna help find at least five posts that I’ve usually cited her in. But she talks about like whenever a new technology is introduced, it’s easy to talk about like, talk about it in a very techno-centric way. Like, what are the benefits of this technology? What are the risks of using this technology. And she advocates for like flipping that on its head like, talk about whose benefits and whose risks. Like actually try to center the people that are in the system that the technology is gonna be sort of impacting. And that’s always been a big influence on me because yeah, I think that if you adopt that very tech solutioneering approach to fixing a problem, your math is gonna to be wrong about how successful you are when you actually get that technology out there because yeah there’s a lot of people that are sort of like wrapped up in there as well. 

Ellen McGirt Beautifully said. Ethan, thank you so much for being here with us today. Best of luck and stay in touch. 

Ethan Marcotte Thank you so much, Ellen. It’s been a real honor. Take care.

Ellen McGirt This season we’re ending every episode with a new segment we’re calling The Business of Design. It will feature either a short interview with or a story about a designer or creative who exemplifies design’s power to shape the world for good. In today’s Business of Design, we are returning to Sylvia Harris. Sylvia passed away in 2011. She was a giant in the world of both graphic and social impact design. Her approach was one that centered the user, especially those not usually considered in design processes. As another example, in addition to her redesign of the census, she led the updating of New York Presbyterian Medical Center’s signage to help patients better navigate the hospital’s halls. Design Observer’s own Jessica Helfand was a close friend of Sylvia’s. To close out today’s Business of Design segment, here is Jessica honoring her friend in a 2014 video when Sylvia was awarded, posthumously, with the AIGA medal. In the show notes, we’ll also link to Jessica’s ordinary tribute to her friend. 

Jessica Helfand 212 in general, and Sylvia in particular, were really the first people that I knew of in our profession who were asking questions that would later become known as part of a larger user-centric orientation in design. Redesigning the census forms. Most people would just say, next. She not only saw that kind of thing as fun, she saw it as just a party waiting to happen. I mean, she really loved the idea of being an ambassador for design. She wasn’t afraid of complicated things, she wasn’t afraid of complicated, boring things. And I think for Sylvia, the idea was that the citizen designer is engaged in the process and not just the outcome. If she could talk to me about some very serious strategy one minute and by the end of the sentence, let me know it was equally important that she stop and buy mittens for her daughter. She loved the visual world, but she was very grounded in need and in purpose. 

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business|Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Design Observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show was written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Thanks as always to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephardt, Rachel Paese, and the entire Design Observe team. And for more long-form content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters, The Design of Business and The Observatory. Head over to designobserver.com.