[DESIGNING WITH FRICTION]

There is growing unease and a sense within the design community with the value placed on efficient, simplified, and seamless interactions, with a growing awareness and documentation of their unintended consequences across society. By prioritizing ‘frictionless’ finance, healthcare, education products and services, there has been a consorted effort to reduce or eliminate our daily frictions in the pursuit of efficiency and ease of use. However, friction's role is more nuanced than this, with a growing appreciation for designing with friction: leveraging features usually considered problematic or exploring the benefits barriers and complexity beyond hindering users. 

The Workshop

In seeking a more balanced understanding of friction in the design of systems, this workshop will offer ways of bringing friction to the fore of design and examining its role across the domains of care, privacy and security, repairability, and autonomous vehicles. Participants will contribute to an exhibition of frictions before taking part in sessions that will unpack digital systems, identify frictions, and examine the ethical ambiguities posed by the addition or removal of friction in particular contexts. In employing the concept of friction as a critical and constructive design lens, we seek to develop further a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) agenda for future discourse that inverts and provokes preconceptions and assumptions of a seamless technological landscape.