Technology has spent decades promising to remove friction from our lives.
Instant. Seamless. Effortless.
One-click checkout. Contactless payments. Face ID. Autocomplete. Same-day delivery. An entire world of information available with a swipe of a finger.
And, for the most part, this is brilliant. Friction can be annoying. Nobody misses waiting three minutes for a website to load or unfolding a massive road atlas on the hard shoulder.
But I wonder if, in our pursuit of making everything effortless, we've started removing some of the good friction too.
Some friction is satisfying
Think about a really good mechanical switch.
There's resistance as you push against it, followed by a tiny moment where the mechanism gives way and clicks satisfyingly into position.
Or the weight of a solid metal dial as you turn it. The texture of paper beneath a pencil. The grain of wood against your fingertips.
None of these things are particularly efficient.
And that's sort of the point.
Physical objects give something back when we interact with them. There's resistance, texture, weight, movement and sound. Your action has a physical consequence that you can see, hear and feel.
Compare that to the perfectly smooth glass screen most of us spend our days tapping and swiping.
It can do almost anything.
But everything feels remarkably... similar.
The value of a little resistance
I've started to think that friction can sometimes be useful.
Writing something by hand is slower than typing it, but that slowness can give you time to think. Flicking a physical switch is less efficient than tapping a screen, but it's also more deliberate. Picking up a tactile object when you're restless takes you into the physical world rather than opening another digital doorway.
These tiny interactions can become little rituals throughout the day.
A notebook opened before you start work. A record placed on a turntable. Pepper ground by hand. A switch flicked beneath your thumb while you're thinking.
They aren't better simply because they're analogue, and I'm certainly not suggesting we deliberately make everything more difficult.
But sometimes the friction is part of what makes the experience meaningful.
Not everything needs to be effortless
This idea has become an important part of how I think about Focus Lab.
I don't want to design objects that remove every physical sensation from an interaction. I want the opposite.
I want a dial to have resistance. A button to have weight. A switch to provide a satisfying click. I want you to feel the grain of the wood and notice the weighty sound an object makes when you put it back on your desk.
These things don't make us more productive in any measurable sense.
They simply make interacting with the world feel a little more real.
And in a world increasingly designed to be instant, seamless and frictionless, perhaps a little resistance isn't such a bad thing.
Sometimes it's worth slowing down enough to feel the click.
