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Joe Gebbia has no business designing government services. President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as “Chief Design Officer” of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption. Gebbia’s directive to make government services “as satisfying to use as the Apple Store” within three years might serve as an appealing soundbyte, but it quickly collapses under the slightest scrutiny: why? how? with what design army? The creation of the so-called National Design Studio and Gebbia’s appointment as its chief should raise serious questions about credentials, institutional destruction, and continued corruption. Design by Regulatory Arbitrage Gebbia’s reputation in design rests on a shaky foundation. AirBnB’s present dominance isn’t the product of real innovation. He and his friends stumbled upon an idea after listing their apartment on Craigslist for under-the-table sublease during a popular conference. They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig. This is important: the very first act of creation was an act of piracy. What AirBnB does today is no different, other than the legitimization that comes with enough capital. The innovation here was collusion: spend enough to ensure that regulatory enforcement costs more; spin enough to make theft look heroic. With Y-Combinator as a launchpad, the company rapidly built its business by systematically ignoring well-established regulations in hospitality and real estate. This sounds like a perfect match for the Trump Administration, and it’s why I cannot take any of Gebbia’s commitments now at face value. His formative business experience taught him to break existing systems rather than designing better ones, and for that he was rewarded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. True design requires understanding constraints, working within complex systems, and serving users’ actual needs rather than exploiting regulatory gaps. Gebbia’s track record suggests a fundamentally different approach — one that prioritizes disruption over responsibility and profit over genuine public service. I’m not sure he can differentiate between entitlement and expertise, self and service, commerce and civics. Institutional Vandalism The hubris of this appointment becomes clearer when viewed alongside the recent dismantling of 18F, the federal government’s existing design services office. Less than a year ago, Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative completely eviscerated this team, which was modeled after the UK’s Government Digital Service and comprised hundreds of design practitioners with deep expertise in government systems. Many of us likely knew someone at 18F. We knew how much value they offered the country. The people in charge didn’t understand what they did and didn’t care. In other words, we were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform. Now we’re expected to believe that dismantling this expertise and starting over with political appointees represents progress. Will Gebbia simply rehire the 18F professionals who were just laid off? If so, why destroy the institutional knowledge in the first place? If not, how does beginning from scratch improve upon what already existed? It doesn’t and it won’t. This appointment has more in common with Trump’s previous appointment of his son-in-law to “solve the conflict in the Middle East,” which resulted in no such thing unless meetings about hotels and real estate counts. Gebbia knows as much about this job as Kushner did about diplomacy, which is nothing. Despite years in “design,” I suspect Gebbia knows little of anything about it, or user experience, or public service. His expertise is in drawing attention while letting robbers in the back door. Impossible Promises, Probable Corruption The timeline alone reveals the proposal’s fundamental unseriousness. Gebbia promises to reform not just the often-cited 26,000 federal websites, but all government services—physical and digital—within three years. Anyone with experience in government systems or even just run-of-the-mill website design knows this is absurd. The UK’s Government Digital Service, working with a much smaller governmental structure, required over a decade to achieve significant results. But three years is plenty of time for something else entirely: securing contracts, regulatory concessions, and other agreements that benefit private interests. Gebbia may no longer run AirBnB day-to-day, but his wealth remains tied to the company. His conspicuous emergence as a Trump supporter just before the 2024 election suggests motivations beyond public service. Trump has consistently demonstrated his willingness to use government power to benefit his businesses and those of his collaborators. There’s a growing list of “business-minded” men granted unfettered access and authority over sweeping government initiatives under Trump who have achieved nothing other than self-enrichment. AirBnB has already disrupted hospitality; their next expansion will likely require the kind of regulatory flexibility that only comes from having allies in high government positions. Now they’ve got a man on the inside. The Pattern of Capture This appointment fits a broader pattern of regulatory capture, where industries gain control over the agencies meant to oversee them. Gebbia’s role ostensibly focuses on improving government services, but it also positions him to influence regulations that could significantly impact AirBnB’s business model and expansion plans. The company has spent years fighting local zoning laws, housing regulations, and taxation requirements. Having a co-founder in a high-level government design role—with access to federal agencies and regulatory processes—creates obvious conflicts of interest that extend far beyond website optimization. Beyond Personal Grievances Full disclosure: I attended college with Joe Gebbia and quickly formed negative impressions of his character that subsequent events have only reinforced. While personal history colors perspective, the substantive concerns about this appointment stand independently: the mismatch between promised expertise and demonstrated capabilities, the destruction of existing institutional knowledge, the unrealistic timeline claims, and the predictable potential for conflicts of interest. Government design reform is important work that requires deep expertise, institutional knowledge, and genuine commitment to public service. It deserves leaders with proven track records in complex systems design, not entrepreneurs whose primary experience involves circumventing existing regulations for private gain. The American people deserve government services that work better. But interacting with government could not – and should not — be more different from buying something at the Apple Store. One is an interface layer upon society – an ecosystem of its own that is irreducible to a point and inextricable from the physical and philosophical world in which it exists. The other is a store. To model one after the other is the sort of idiocy we should expect from people who either understand little to nothing about how either thing should work or just don’t care. I suspect it’s both.

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Every great design has one organizing detail that unlocks everything else, and the best design leaders never stop looking for it. Every good piece of design has at least one detail that is the “key” to unlocking an understanding of how it works. Good designers will notice that detail right away, while most people will respond to it subconsciously, sometimes never recognizing it for what it is or what it does. These key details are the organizing principles that make everything else possible. They’re rarely the most obvious elements — not the largest headline or the brightest color — but rather the subtle choices that create hierarchy, guide attention, and establish the invisible structure that holds a design together. Sometimes those key details fall into place right away; they may be essential components of how an idea takes its form, or how function shapes a thing. But just as often, these keys are discovered as a designer works through iterations with extremely subtle differences. Sometimes moving elements around in a layout, perhaps even by a matter of pixels, enables a key to do its work, if not reveal itself entirely. Without these organizing details, even technically proficient design falls flat. Elements feel arbitrary rather than purposeful. Visual hierarchy becomes muddy. The viewer’s eye wanders without direction. What separates good design from mediocre design is often nothing more than recognizing which detail needs to be the key — and having the skill to execute it properly and the discipline to clear its path. Seeing the Key in Action Recently, a designer on my team and I reviewed layouts for a series of advertisements in a digital campaign. We’ve enjoyed working with this particular client — an industrial design firm specializing in audio equipment — because their design team is sophisticated and their high standards not only challenge us, but inspire us. (It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s easier to produce good design for good designers. When your client understands what you do, they may push you harder, but they’ll also know what you need in order to deliver what they want.) The designer had produced a set of ads that visually articulated the idea of choice — an essential psychological element for the customer profile of high-end audio technology — in a simple and elegant way. Two arrows ran in parallel until they diverged, curving in different directions. They bisected the ad space asymmetrically, with one arrow rendered in color veering off toward the left and the other, rendered in white, passing it before turning toward the right. This white arrow was the key. It overpowered the bold, colored arrow by pushing further into the ad space, while creating a clear arc that drew the eye down toward the ad’s copy and call to action. It’s a perfect example of old-school graphic design; it will do its work without being understood by most viewers, but its function is unmistakable once you see it. In reviewing this piece, I saw the key right away. I saw how it worked — what it unlocked. And I also recognized that the designer who made it saw it, too. I could tell based upon his choices of color, the way he positioned the arrows — the only shapes, other than text, in the entire ad — and even the way he had used the curve radius to subtly reference the distinct, skewed and rotated “o” in the brand’s logotype. This kind of sophisticated thinking, where every element serves multiple purposes and connects to larger brand systems, separates competent design from exceptional design. The white arrow wasn’t just directing attention; it was reinforcing brand identity and creating a sense of forward momentum that aligned with the client’s messaging about innovation and choice. The Maturity Trap I’ve often heard it said that as a designer’s career matures, the distance between their responsibility and functional details grows — that design leadership is wielded in service of the “big picture,” unencumbered by the travails of implementation so that it can maintain a purity of service to ideas and strategy. I couldn’t disagree with this more. While it’s true that senior designers must think strategically and guide teams rather than execute every detail personally, this doesn’t mean they should lose touch with the craft itself. The ability to recognize and create key details doesn’t become less important as careers advance — it becomes more crucial for developing teams and ensuring quality across projects. A design director who can’t spot the organizing principle in a layout, or who dismisses pixel-level adjustments as beneath their concern, has lost touch with the foundation of what makes design work. They may be able to talk about brand strategy and user experience in broad strokes, but they can’t guide their teams toward the specific choices that will make those strategies successful. No Big Picture Without Details My perspective is that no idea can be meaningful without being synchronized with reality — as informed by it as it is influential upon it. There is no “big picture” without detail. The grandest strategic vision fails when it’s not supported by countless small decisions made with precision and purpose. No matter how one’s career matures, a designer must at least retain access to the details, if not a regular, direct experience of them. This doesn’t mean micromanaging or doing work that others should be doing. It means maintaining the ability to see how abstract concepts become concrete solutions, to recognize when something is working and when it isn’t, and to guide others toward the key details that will make their work succeed. Without that connection to craft, we become blind to the keys at work — we lock ourselves out of an understanding of the work that could help us develop our teams or ourselves. We lose the ability to distinguish between design that looks impressive and design that actually functions. We can no longer teach what we once knew. The best design leaders I’ve known maintain a hand in the craft throughout their careers. They may delegate execution, but they never lose their eye for the detail that makes everything else work. They understand that leadership in design isn’t about rising above the details — it’s about seeing them more clearly and helping others see them too. Great design has always been about the details. The only thing that changes as we advance in our careers is our responsibility for ensuring those details exist in the work of others. That’s a responsibility we can only fulfill if we never stop looking for the keys ourselves.

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