Exploring the potential of designing for effort

FRICTION INTENDED

During my time as an Industrial Design student, I received numerous briefs and assignment of a great variety. Several problems to solve and issues to address. However, whatever the issue at hand, the aimed solution seemed so often similar. Design, apparently, is there to make peoples lives more easy and comfortable, and also almost always unquestionably, more efficient.

In my Master Degree project at Konstfack Stockholm, I researched the potential value to be found when not making the usual assumption that all we want is ease and efficiency - and explored what happens when you design for effort.

“As computing has emerges from the office and laboratory, it seems to have brought along values of the workplace: concerns for clarity, efficiency and productivity.”

Bill Gaver

“First of all, design is about people. It is about our lives, our hopes and dreams, our loneliness and joy, our sense of beauty and justice, about the social and the good. It is about being in the world.”

Kees Overbeeke

“Life is more than a problem to be solved and users are more than vessels of unfulfilled needs.

[...]

The intention is not to design so that people always feel good and never feel bad. Instead, it is to design such that people have a chance to embrace all the dimensions fo life, including hardship, adversity, and opportunity.”

Peter Desmet

Designing for effort in everyday products creates space to design for an engaging and stimulating environment. Once deciding simple things are worth more time, strain and patience there is the opportunity to enrich those activities. Effort has the potential to create space for the development of contemporary rituals, active engagement and everyday curiosity.

Want to know more?

Available on the right as pdf dowloads are the full essay, to be read in combination with the more visual inlays: Friction Intended ABC, which present the three design proposals intended to showcase the range of potential, and Friction Intended Way of Working, which translates the used approach in an applicable design research method.

Essay

ABC

Method