.space
.
Research dispatches on ecologically purposeful friction.
Friction as
Affordance for
Flourishing
(2024) University of Cambridge
effort-less
ideal
.
According to big tech:
“the future is frictionless”
(1)
These companies seek to make our existence effortless, doing so by designing away the discomforts and inconveniences - the frictions -that get in the way of efficient progress. Why? To make the world a better place to live? Or to expedite the one-click-purchase > next-day-delivery of their products?
(2.UX Diagram) (3.Also see)2. UX WISDOM
(A to B as the bro flies)
1. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, On stage at Facebook event, 2011. LINK
2. The classic ‘friction vs. frictionless’ UX diagram found in many tech UX guides. LINK
3. Proliferation of business books promising that removing frictions will lead to riches. LINK
.
.
The frictionless ideal is perhaps unsurprising when so much of our modern world has been engineered for speedy, automated efficiency.
(4) (5)
Coupled with a ‘productisation’ of our public spaces and services, these design trends prioritise subscribers over both ordinary citizens and the interconnected ecologies that we all depend on.
(6)
5.Removing friction for speed and ease
4. The critique of applying industrial efficiency in daily life is exemplified by the discourse on technology in the home. One such classic: LINK
5. Diagram showing the correlation between designing for efficiency and the removal of friction in the context of architecture.
6. Listen to Rem Koolhaas and Tony Fadell discuss this productisation of architecture here: LINK
.
city
limits
.
Designing out these frictions ‘upstream’ in apps is having serious impacts downstream, in the city. Our pick-up and put-down where we want culture is more than just a public nuisance, but part of a re-wiring of the city that serves subscribers first.
(7)What are the deeper ecological costs of environments that adapt to us (and not even all of us) rather than asking us to adapt to them?
(8)
9.Upstream/Downstream Impact Mapping
7. Baumer, "Usees," Proceedings of CHI (2015) — the user/usee distinction between paid subscribers and collateral impacts on others.
8. “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, p5
9. A novel methodology has been developed for linking upstream digital strategies with downstream physical-world implications: Impact Mapping.
.
Beyond the impact on the city, if we outsource everything to automated systems what do we lose as humans? (10)
Moments of friction act as critical punctuation in our experience of the world. We are bumped into awareness of others by them. They orient us within our environments and signpost our limits. These punctuations are generally what affords us the opportunity for continued adaptation, without them we will atrophy.
(11) (12)11. Friction as vital experiential punctuation
11. See: Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) LINK
12. “If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the pushbutton finger.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, during a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, reported in Newsweek on May 16, 1955.
When we hand everyday tasks over to convenience technologies, we quietly outsource human capacities like autonomy, awareness, and skill. Research tells us that our environments need to offer us these exact same capacities in order for us to be healthy.
(13)
Opportunities for healthy action offered by our environments are called ‘affordances’. When we start to see frictions as affordances rather than annoyances, they become possibilities to exercise what makes us human: autonomy, creativity, skill, awareness and meaning.
(14)
..
the FAF framework:
13.See Wellbeing research such as SDT
LINK
14. Gibson’s Theory of Affordances
LINK
-full
futures
Despite the mainstream obsession with efficient automations, there are some very interesting folks swimming against this current, and enriching themselves in the glorious in-between.
(15)
Some of these examples form case studies within the research, as well as inspiring the ongoing design of a series of friction-full products for richer, more interactive home life.
(16)
16. These ideas are being explored with P-ERA (Products for Ecologically Relative Autonomy) and an update will be released late 2026.