Friction is back, baby. And she’s got something to prove.
If there is one element of the contemporary that might be said to incorporate all the others, it is the Leviticus-like opprobrium towards friction. We’ve been busy getting rid of it for five- decades or so now, and in the last two, evidence suggested we’d succeeded in many spheres of our life, and in many places. Think Uber, Fivrr, open office plans, Tinder, glass and concrete buildings, minimalism, one-click anything, discount airlines, role-your-own-TV, Facebook (whose founder actually said it was the company’s mission to do away with it), mass customization, mass luxury, and on and on and on. What a difference two months make. Friction is back, baby. And she’s got something to prove.
Of course, frictionlessness was always fantasy, more about shifting the place of the friction from well-paid, or well-surveilled consumers to less-well-paid, and oftentimes more- surveilled workers, or hiding the friction under carefully constructed artifice designed to coopt our idea of the way a perfect world might work.
Let nothing stand in the way of the consumer and what he or she wants. Make it easy and watch the money roll in. Make it seem like a simple holistic solution to a complicated problem, and you’ll have them for life.
Turn’s out, friction’s a thing. It’s what makes evolution happen. It’s what allows us to learn. It’s what generates curiosity, joy, sadness, and laughter. It’s what brings people together (and tears them apart) and makes us human. It’s what slows us down so we can see, hear, feel, taste. It allows for serendipity. For memory. For better decisions, and teachable moments when we make bad ones. It is, in other words, part of who we are and how our lives make meaning.
If we care about a better world through the application of better design, then a path is clear. It’s time to get frictional.
Whether we’re designing textiles, or clothing, or home goods, or workspaces, or homes, or businesses, or buildings, or floor coverings, or any of the hundreds of other places where thoughtful approaches to how we do things and how they are experienced, we have an extraordinary opportunity.
We can reclaim something profound for ourselves, for our customers, and for humanity.
Want to talk about how we can do this together? About the opportunities to remake our world? We’d love to, too.
—Peter
