The Taito Pact
As creators of technology and services, we bind ourselves to these commitments:
Our Obligations
We will not extract value without returning it. We will not optimize for speed at the cost of care. We will not claim progress while causing harm. We will not abandon those who depend on our work.
Our Commitments
- We bind ourselves to the places where our work lives:
- Maintaining active presence in communities we serve
- Building local capacity, not dependency
- Sharing knowledge freely and completely
- Accepting responsibility for long-term impacts
- We bind ourselves to prevention over repair:
- Studying deeply before acting
- Testing for harm before deployment
- Designing for maintenance from the start
- Choosing stability over constant change
- We bind ourselves to honest measures:
- Tracking harm prevented, not just value created
- Measuring community strength, not just growth
- Valuing reduced dependency over increased usage
- Judging success by lasting benefit
- We bind ourselves to collective craft:
- Building with communities, not just for them
- Teaching our methods, not just our tools
- Growing capability, not just capacity
- Leaving every place stronger than we found it
Terms of the Pact
This pact remains in force as long as our work affects others. It cannot be suspended for convenience or profit. Breaking these commitments requires public acknowledgment and repair.
By signing this pact, we accept that:
- Our obligations extend beyond our employment
- Our impact must be measured in generations
- Our success depends on community flourishing
- Our work must reduce harm, not just create value
We enter this pact freely, understanding that it will often require choosing the harder path.
Signed by those who seek to practice technology as a craft of care rather than a tool of extraction.
Beyond the myths of broken systems & services
Beyond the Design Industrial Complex
For years, I’ve worked in consequence design — examining how interfaces and technology proliferate our daily lives, and confronting whether things “had to be that way.” But lately, this lens feels insufficient. When entire systems are failing, debating API design feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Don’t get me wrong: accessible interfaces, plain language, and inclusive design matter. But they matter in the context of systems that fundamentally don’t work.
Enter antieconomics
antieconomics started as a thought experiment: What if we measured what actually matters instead of what’s easy to count? But the more I examine our failing systems, the more it feels less like speculation and more like necessity.
Let’s talk about failure. Not the kind that gets packaged into case studies, but the kind that reshapes cities and lives:
Public Systems Crumbling:
- Unemployment systems running on COBOL crash during a pandemic
- Cities lacking basic services like municipal waste management
- Emergency response systems failing during natural disasters
- Public transit tracking showing phantom buses that never arrive
- Healthcare systems requiring fax machines in 2024
Technology “Solving” Problems by Creating New Ones:
- Ride-share apps “disrupting” taxis while decimating public transit funding
- Delivery apps replacing stable jobs with precarious gig work
- Ghost kitchens replacing local restaurants while extracting community wealth
- Rental platforms converting housing stock into short-term stays
- Payment apps replacing cash systems that worked for unbanked people
- Grocery delivery services making local food deserts even worse
- Social media “connecting” people while destroying local news ecosystems
The Hidden Costs:
- Cities building infrastructure for tech companies with public money
- Workers bearing all the risk while platforms take the profit
- Communities losing gathering spaces to optimization algorithms
- Public transit being undermined then declared “inefficient”
- Local businesses cannot compete with venture-subsidized losses
- People needing multiple apps just to access basic services
- Neighborhoods losing walkability to dark stores and fulfillment centers
This isn’t just about broken systems. It’s about how technology reshapes systems to extract value while pushing the real costs onto workers, communities, and public infrastructure. While we debate the finer points of design systems and front-end frameworks, these shifts continue to impact real people in real time.
These aren’t bugs. They’re features of systems designed to measure the wrong things.
The Framework
antieconomics proposes three core truths:
- Systems Are Stories We Tell
- COBOL isn’t just old technology — it’s a story about what we choose not to update
- Lack of municipal services isn’t just oversight — it’s a story about what we choose not to value
- Invisible money isn’t just economics — it’s a story about power
- Measurement Is Power
- What we measure shapes what we value
- What we ignore reveals what we accept
- Who decides what to measure decides who benefits
- Value Is Real
- Community resilience can’t be quantified but it can be felt
- Invisible labor holds everything together
- Human dignity matters more than efficiency
From Theory to Practice
antieconomics isn’t just critique. It’s a framework for understanding how systems fail and what we might do about it.
Instead of GDP, measure:
- How many people can access basic services
- How communities support each other
- How resources actually circulate locally
Instead of efficiency metrics, track:
- Who benefits from “optimization”
- What breaks when systems fail
- Who picks up the pieces
Instead of engagement analytics, examine:
- Who gets left behind
- What communities actually need
- How dignity gets preserved or destroyed
Building New Muscles
To practice antieconomics, we need to develop:
- System Literacy
- Reading past official narratives
- Understanding who benefits from failure
- Identifying where power actually lives
- Value Recognition
- Seeing invisible labor
- Measuring what matters to communities
- Understanding real costs
- Action Frameworks
- Moving beyond critique
- Building alternative systems
- Supporting existing community solutions
Real Talk
Implementing antieconomics means confronting uncomfortable truths:
- Many systems are working exactly as designed
- Failure for some means profit for others
- Better metrics alone won’t fix broken systems
- Change requires more than good design
What Now?
antieconomics isn’t a solution — it’s a tool for understanding what’s broken and imagining what might work instead. It asks:
- What if we measured community resilience instead of growth?
- What if we valued invisible labor instead of invisible transactions?
- What if we optimized for dignity instead of efficiency?
- What if we built systems that actually served people?
These aren’t academic questions. They’re survival questions. Because while we debate design systems and front-end frameworks, real systems are failing real people in real time.
The work starts with seeing clearly. It continues with measuring differently. It succeeds by building alternatively.
An Invitation
This framework is evolving. It has to. The systems we’re examining keep finding new ways to fail. But that’s also why we need new tools for understanding and addressing these failures.
Whether you’re a designer, developer, researcher, or just someone trying to understand why things don’t work like they should — antieconomics offers a way to think about systems beyond their stated purposes and imagined successes.
The question isn’t whether systems will fail. They’re already failing. The question is: What are we going to do about it?
This is part of an ongoing exploration of systems, measurement, and failure. It builds on work in consequence design and critical system examination. More to come.
What Happens After We Stop Talking About Design
Design For The Public 24 wrapped up last week, bringing together folks from around the country for two days of deep introspection, small group discussions, and vulnerable conversations across Portland venues. The experience reinforced something I’ve been turning over in my mind: the gap between how we talk about design and doing measureable, repeatable impact work.
Beyond Metrics and Methods
During my talk, I mentioned critical design - an approach that questions our assumptions about how things should work. While this might sound academic, it’s actually pretty simple: instead of just asking “how do we make this better?” we ask “why do we think this is the right thing to measure in the first place?”
Think about it: How many times have you worked on a project where all the metrics looked great, but something still felt off? Maybe you hit every KPI but users were still frustrated. Maybe engagement was up but actual user satisfaction was down. Maybe everything looked successful on paper but didn’t create any meaningful change in reality.
What We Measure vs. What Matters
This got me thinking about a concept I’m calling antieconomics. Don’t let the name scare you - it’s just a way of questioning how we measure success in design. For example:
- When we measure “user engagement,” are we measuring something useful or just something easy to count?
- When we track “time on page,” are we assuming longer is better without asking why?
- When we celebrate “increased efficiency,” are we considering what might be lost in the process?
The Real Work
During the conference, we talked about “wicked problems” - those messy, complex challenges that don’t have clear solutions. The kind that make you question whether you’re even asking the right questions.
Here’s what makes them wicked:
- They’re hard to define clearly
- Different people see them differently
- There’s no “right” answer
- Standard solutions often miss the point
Sound familiar? It should - it describes most of the real challenges we face in design work.
A Different Approach
This is where antieconomics comes in. Instead of just accepting traditional metrics, it suggests we step back and ask:
- What if we measured what users say matters to them?
- What if we valued the invisible work that makes systems function?
- What if we designed around human dignity instead of just efficiency?
Moving Forward
The conversations at Design For The Public revealed something important: many of us are quietly questioning our standard measures of success. We’re ready for different ways of thinking about impact.
This isn’t about throwing away all measurement - it’s about measuring things that actually matter. It’s about being honest about what our design work really achieves, not just what looks good in a case study.
An Invitation
As the conference wrapped up, many participants shared that they felt less alone in questioning these things. That’s what happens when you create space for real conversation about hard things.
I’d love to hear your thoughts:
- What metrics do you wish you could retire?
- What would you measure if you could measure anything?
- How do you handle the gap between what you can measure and what actually matters?
This piece is the b-side to my talk at Design For The Public 24. Sometimes the most important conversations happen after the formal presentation ends.
Rushing into the elevator to avoid saying hello (Or more reflections on life in Portland)
I’ve met a lot of nice people here in the past 6 years. Not just people i’ve been in relationships with, but like friends I’ve made in random ways over the years. Still, it’s hard not to acknowledge that the Pacific Northwest’s reptuation for reclusive frostiness is hard won. Locals with any tenure here find this assertion very frustrating to here, for wincing fear that they might be part of the problem.
Rest assured, if you like hiking, own a dog, have a penchant for running and/or alternative relationship forms, Portland might suit you quite well. These days, this description fits a lot of places since technology has flatten culture in ways that forces you to squint to see the distinctions between cities besides bars, restaurants and local landmarks.
I’ve gotten pretty good at making sure I don’t have my phone out or earbuds in when I come to pickup an order at a restaurant, because the staff always assuming when i’m dining in that I’m actually a delivery pickup driver. This happens a lot, and I’ve stopped hiding my annoyance about it. I get that if you’re working a stressful relatively low-paid job that engages the public, there’s an advantage of having the skill to size up people when they walk in, so you know where to sort them. But this sort of pattern matching extends to so many other parts of our increasingly atomized lives and it makes navigating life on your own more difficult, if you’re committed to finding your way alone.
This would be true of any place, I don’t think it’s unique to here. If I lived in Helsinki or Montreal or Vermont, there’d be all sorts of other unforseen annoyances that would come with that decision, along with slights and other things that make it tolerable as a tourist and more frustrating as a resident. Portland’s problems really stem from governance that’s hellbent on consensus at all costs, even if it means never making a decision until everyone agrees. The more I read about this going back years, the more annoyed I get.
We’re getting ready to elect new leaders for the city’s first new government change in over a century, our City Council will go from 4 at-large members + 1 voting Mayor, to 12 members from 4 districts + 1 non-voting Mayor who appoints a city manager to run government. It’ll be way different than we’ve had before, no one has any idea how it’ll play out and it’s very different than any other city’s governance, just like the old one was. There are some good parts to it, but the warts will show up quickly and it’ll be interesting to see if we can move past them or if it’ll make stuff even more mysterious and ineffective.
What does this have to do with the city’s social scene? Things move slower here. The more I talk to people from other places, we recognize a common thread that motivated people from other places willing to get involved in things in Portland, have more opportunity to lead those efforts because too often, other people don’t actually want to do anything, they just want to be part of the committee/team/in-crowd or whatever.
The remarkable thing about putting together Portland Design Month with volunteers in less than a year was how desperate the city was for some kind of way to come together. We saw it through other events we’ve hosted through AIGA Portland, that people craved more community and chances to meet people they might not otherwise come into contact with. I’ve though about this a lot, because I think it’s easy after a while to assume you’ve kinda met everybody there is.
A few events we’ve done this year, I’ve run across times when there’s 50+ people in a row and I only know the few people from our Board. It’s one thing to have this happen at a concert or event where I’m not expecting to run across anyone I know, but discovering all of these people who’ve moved here in the past 2-3 years, and it reminds me I like connecting people and connecting myself.
You never know what people are going through, so I’m not too worried about people not speaking on the street or even on the elevator. Instead of worrying about it or complaining about it, I’ve just resolved myself to create more spaces and opportunities to get people together. If I’m on the elevator, I hold it. I say hello. Sometimes, we have a conversation. Other times, it’s nothing but a polite smile and nothing else. Hell, there are times when I don’t really have much to say either and I just want to get to the ground floor and head to the store or whatever I’m plotting to do that day.
In the end, Portland’s social climate is what we make of it. While the city’s reputation for aloofness isn’t entirely unearned, there’s an undercurrent of desire for connection that’s waiting to be tapped. Whether it’s organizing events, holding the elevator door, or simply offering a smile, small gestures can gradually thaw the “Portland Chill. As we navigate this new era of city governance and continued growth, perhaps the real challenge isn’t just reimagining our political structures, but also how we interact with each other on a daily basis.
After all, a city is more than its policies and landmarks—it’s the sum of the connections we forge and the communities we build, one awkward elevator ride at a time.
Wrote about that one time I was a game designer
I don’t talk about inventing a sport much these days, but I did a short retrospective — as a chance to reboot my newsletter — on Toccer/Tennis on the occasion of its 20th anniversary this year. I have a lot of thoughts and experience having designed and iterated a sport, the parallels are similar in many ways to designing a board game. It’s just harder and more dynamic to invent a new sport, because adoption is very difficult to get and most people can only really sustain the development of a new sport if you turn it into a business.
It’s funny to think how many modern sports simply wouldn’t exist if they were introduced now, and why I sort of cringe at e-sports wider adoption, because while I respect the skill they take, the idea that sports should be proprietary things that someone “owns” is what makes sports growth extremely difficult. Another pasttime of mine, skeeball has this problem relative to pinball. Skeeball lanes are pretty expensive as far as arcade machines go, they’re noisy and they take up a lot of space. Pinball machines are smaller, less noisy and because there’s no corporate trademark on the name “pinball” people are free to make them and the makers of those games actively encourage competitive events around the game. Skeeball’s makers sued people who tried to use the name in their league, before settling, and years later the only people who can use the name basically make it difficult for the game to grow…because all they really care about is selling more skeeball lanes.
Which makes sense, they’re really expensive. But I digress.
Sports are fun and a great way to make small talk with strangers in far-flung places. But more people should invent sports that people actually play, without needing tons of tech.
On AI and Care
I’ve been thinking about the small things that happen within the margins of interpersonal interactions, specifically those that occur in a service context. The bus driver who always remembers you ride every day at a certain stop and waits a few seconds longer than prescribed to make sure you don’t miss your ride. The coffee shop barista or bartender who sees you walking in and starts making your order. These are “decisions of care.”
If “design is the rendering of care,” as Pavel Samsonov says, it presupposes that the designer imagines someone to care about. This same idea extends to getting different types of treatment in service contexts, depending on your qualifiers—where you are from, the ability of the person serving to relate to you, power dynamics, money, and a host of other factors—which makes measuring quality in these contexts far more complicated than just throwing together metrics and looking at a snapshot from on high.
I’m not thinking about the application of this concept in the context of large-scale consumer platforms. The proliferation of AI and the depersonalization of peer-to-peer experiences like trade, shopping, and even day-to-day interactions with local municipalities are increasingly being deputized to third parties. I’ve spent years complaining about large companies and universities outsourcing blue-collar jobs like cleaning services and maintenance. These roles used to be pathways to the middle class, as they enabled hard-working people, perhaps without the same educational opportunities, to receive the same benefits (real and fringe) that knowledge workers, managers, and executives get.
As we continue to mediate person-to-person experiences, people will begin to forget how to interact without a device, platform, or tool. If these platforms are owned by just a few companies without any interoperability, it’ll cause even more problems when they’re shut off or the rules change. Policymakers are ill-equipped to deal with these challenges because there’s very little in the law designed to navigate these complexities. Worse, things like vendor lock-in will trap medium-sized companies and smaller communities into platforms they don’t understand as well as they think. The prohibitive cost of these lock-ins will also cause harm that will be difficult to repair.
Civic life is transforming before our eyes. We’re not able to go backwards, but we can move forward within intention, but it’ll take deciding the sort of world we want to live in and not letting platforms, tools & AI destabilize everyday life faster than we’re able to slow things down.