Link tags: friction

Flood fill vs. the magic circle

Eleven years ago, I wrote:

Sometimes I consider the explosive growth of computation and think that strong AI is a near-term inevitability.

Then I remember printers.

That was just a brainfart, but Robin tackles it seriously in his thoughtful essay.

A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.

Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible.

Nobody wants to use any software — Character

I do not want any software

I believe that this mindset is the healthiest way to design and build things that people will use and not hate us for building. For me, it’s a way to remind myself that all humans have a whole rich, challenging life outside of the little screens I’m making for them. So that even when I’m focused on user needs and user problems, I can keep it just out of the corner of my eye: the person I’m making this for doesn’t actually want to be here, and that’s OK.

We want speedy internet and fast-loading services because we want to stop pushing buttons and opening accordions as quickly as possible.

Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)

This sounds like seamful design:

How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?

Make Me Think | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

The removal of all friction should’t be a goal. Making things easy and making things hard should be a design tool, employed to aid the end user towards their loftiest goals.

Is Tech Too Easy to Use? - The New York Times

Seams!

Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.