This Thursday, September 9th, marks the deadline for the FDA to decide which vaping products can stay on the market. The agency needs to determine if Juul’s products have enough public health benefit to justify their widespread use among teens. While Juul’s founders envisioned Juul as a safer alternative for smokers than combustible cigarettes, their sleek design, ease of use, fruity flavors, and edgy marketing made them incredibly popular with teenagers who had never smoked before.

Juul: A case study in the power of Design

Creating a luxury good

In the early 2000s, e-cigarettes emerged as an alternative to cigarettes by delivering the nicotine smokers crave without the carcinogens involved in combustible cigarettes. However e-cigarettes didn’t gain widespread appeal until Juul hit the scene in 2015.

Founded by two graduates of Stanford’s esteemed d.school, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, Juul understood the power of Design. Existing e-cigarettes on the market were cheap and basic, churned out from a variety of factories in China, and Bowen and Monsees realized that thoughtful design could be a massive differentiator.

In the pair’s thesis presentation in 2005, Bowen explained that through elevated design they could “take tobacco back to being a luxury good and not so much a drug delivery device that cigarettes have become.”

Early on, they recruited design giant Yvar Béhar, who was later named the “Most Influential Industrial Designer in the World”, to lead designs for Pax, Juul’s marijuana predecessor. Focusing on simplicity and elegance above all else, Béhar produced stunning products. After its 2012 launch, Pax was well-received, and people loved its sleek, modern feel.

Richard Mumby, the Chief Marketing Officer at Pax Labs, explained how his goal with Pax was “to make a strong connection within fashion and art, similar to what Beats by Dre has done…people in fashion clearly care about products that are designed well, thoughtfully and beautifully. They’re passionate about design and premium functionality.”

Mumby succeeded.

Racked, a retail and shopping subsidiary of Vox, argued: “One company has managed to transcend the category’s clunky shortcomings and emerge as the ‘cool’ vaporizer, thanks in part to a brilliant alignment with the fashion world…In addition to making a product that looks good, Pax has managed to successfully market itself in a way other vape brands haven’t: as a fashion accessory.”

After Pax’s success, Monsees and Bowen developed Juul. Invoking the essence of a flash drive, Juul oozed futuristic, cool tech gadget. Its design and functionality improvements invited users to leave behind the negative connotations associated with smoking a cigarette and even gain social standing.

Juul was carefully designed and developed for maximum ease of use, and thus literal addiction.

Smoother, more nicotine-laden inhalation

Monsees and Bowen hired Xing Chenyue, an accomplished chemist, to reimagine the inhalation experience. Instead of using free-base nicotine, she develop nicotine salts that could deliver a high-nicotine, low-irritant experience. This allowed Juul to increase the nicotine concentration from two percent to five percent without a harsh experience.

Fun, fruity flavors

Juul then courted the best flavor chemists in the world to make their pods taste like candy. With inklings of Willy Wonka, chemists churned out a range of sweet, fruity flavors from mango to fruit medley to creme brulee.

These fun, whimsical flavors help abstract away the negative outcomes of smoking and nicotine addiction. One report found that two-thirds of young JUUL users (ages 15 to 21) don’t know that the product always contains nicotine, which is known to change brain chemistry and can impair memory and concentration and make youth more susceptible to other substance addiction.

Easy, inconspicuous use

Juul’s small, compact design makes it much more convenient than basic cigarettes. “It’s so small, so easy to hide in the palm of your hand. And they’re rechargeable!”, an 18 year old from Louisville exclaimed. The vapor biproduct produces a minimal cloud of sweet smelling vapor that quickly disappears. These features just so happen to make it quite easy to hide their habit from parents and teachers.

Additionally, the subtle deletion of the on/off switch reduced friction, making it easy to consume a whole pack’s worth of nicotine in a few hours without much thought. Ever ready, the user just has to suck on Juul to receive a quick, satisfying hit.

Outcomes

In only a few years, Juul peaked at a $38 billion dollar valuation. Yet it soon faced a deluge of regulations, lawsuits, and mobs of angry parents. Youth e-cigarette use rose 1,800% from 2011 to 2019.

Reckoning with the responsibility of Design

Recognizing collective responsibility

As a field, Design loves to paint itself as a savior, at the least reworking painfully poor experiences and at the best designing a better world. Our field is rooted in beneficial, well-intentioned foundations — empathy, compassion, and human-centered — but we need to be honest with ourselves, reflect on our capabilities, and recognize our limits.

When we paint ourselves as all-powerful saviors, we set ourselves up for failure. In reality, Design is one of many functions involved in product development and launch, and we can’t allow ourselves to be deemed the sole function responsible for building ethical products.

“Not all of us are powerful wizards, and more often than not, incentives and systems drive outcomes.”

Based on the fundamental attribution error, humans tend to overemphasize dispositional factors and discount situational ones. We Designers are only human, and we can’t be expected to continuously be the only ones pushing back against engagement and profits at all costs.

Understanding the context and the hubris of Silicon Valley

Ask forgiveness not permission.

Move fast and break things.

Silicon Valley’s de facto business model and Zuckerberg’s infamous (and all too prescient) motto sum up the general ethos of technology today. Pressured by investors and lured by unimaginable wealth, technologists and founders often cut corners and rationalize away negative externalities in pursuit of explosive growth and dominant market share.

While Juul started with the lofty mission of saving 1 billion smokers’ lives, they ended up addicting tens of thousands of teenagers. In the face of rampant data concretely showing this, the founders and employees turned a blind eye and rationalized it away.

As a whole, technologists need to work together to build more equitable and ethical products. Collectively tech workers enjoy a position of power and privilege — we’re well compensated and we build products and services that touch billions of people. As a whole, we need to recognize and internalize this responsibility.

By understanding existing constraints, we can work collectively to develop innovative solutions.

Where do we go from here?

Unfortunately this is a big, thorny problem, and there isn’t a single, simple way to fix it. Ultimately it will take collective empowerment, responsibility, and action. Here are some initial first steps that might get the ball rolling…

Establish our values, goals, and boundaries up front

We need to determine our values and limits up front and stick to them. Building cross-functional partnerships and continuously engaging in open and honest reflection and dialogue can help us clarify and maintain our ethics in the face of tempting, but ill-begotten growth and profits.

Establishing our values may not be too difficult, but sticking to them often is.

Juul’s founders set out to take on Big Tobacco and said they’d never ever sell to them. But when the price was right, they relented. As Stanford students Brin and Page said they’d never allow paid search results since it would erode trust, but then money came into play.

Explicitly writing out our goals and values and publicly showcasing and discussing them can help hold us accountable and prevent us from rationalizing away the threats.

Continuously think through and mitigate potential negative outcomes

We need to spend more time up front thinking through the full spectrum of potential outcomes, especially bad ones. What could go wrong? What would make us the villain? What’s the worst case scenario?

Particularly if our product has serious ramifications (i.e. health, policing, government, etc), we need to prioritize thoughtful development over launching rushed, half-baked products in the name of growth at all costs.

At the very least, we need to be more responsive to negative feedback. When Facebook learned of evidence of its platform spreading fake news and manipulating elections, Zuckerberg buried it. When Juul learned teens were rapidly adopting their product, they turned a blind eye and focused on their “noble” mission of helping existing smokers.

Design could lead the charge, but we need to build strong partnerships with Product, Engineering, Executive Leaders, and others in order to have real impact.

Demand more from companies, and ourselves

Governments, organizations, and individuals should demand more and hold companies accountable. Instead of simply prioritizing shareholders’ interests, we — and our lawmakers — should demand companies consider additional factors such as society, sustainability, and the environment. Companies won’t do this from the goodness of their heart, but we should amend our policies, investments, and markets to force them to take more into consideration than simply money.

As consumers, we can speak with our wallets and actions. We can boycott, protest, and litigate companies that release harmful products.

Additionally, as tech workers we can refuse to work for companies that prioritize growth and profits over all else. There are two sides to a paycheck — the amount of money as well as the employer. If you’re having moral or ethical qualms, listen to them! Don’t bend over backwards to rationalize your actions — move to a better company where you don’t have them. I personally have experienced this, and I feel a daily relief having switched.