FRICTIONAL AI WORKSHOP

Close to the Metal — Real Life

The value of reintroducing friction into our interactions with computers

Design Frictions for Mindful Interactions: The Case for Microboundaries

Design frictions, a term found in popular media articles about user experience design, refer to points of difficulty occurring during interaction with technology. Such articles often argue that these frictions should be removed from interaction flows in order to reduce the risk of user frustration and disengagement. In this paper we argue that, in many scenarios, designing friction into interactions through the introduction of microboundaries, can, in fact, have positive effects. Design frictions can disrupt "mindless" automatic interactions, prompting moments of reflection and more "mindful" interaction. The potential advantages of intentionally introduced frictions are numerous: from reducing the likelihood of errors in data-entry tasks, to supporting health-behaviour change.

choosing friction

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

The Friction I Don't Want to Lose

I love learning. And while the friction of solving new problems is increasingly traded for speed, the experience gained by overcoming that friction is as important as ever.

Human–AI Collaboration at Scale: Task Criticality, Agency, and Friction Across 250,000 Conversations

Stanford University researchers analyzed nearly 250,000 real-world human-AI conversations from Claude.ai to understand collaborative dynamics, finding that over half of interactions involve...

AI Coding will Prevent Expertise | Lars Faye

The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.

Humanity-as-a-Service

Commoditizing the human touch in the age of AI

Anti AI? Be Pro Human! - Sylvia’s Studio

This is the fifth post in my 'hitting the digital brakes'-series. These are the previous posts in this series: 1. the joys of imperfection  2. Do we really need the...

Tool Making Follow-Up: What I Mean by Friction

Hopefully clearing up some of my vagueness to reduce misunderstanding.

AI Engineer's 2025 | Unsloth Documentation

Slides to our AI Engineer's Worlds Fair 2025 Workshop.

Human scientists trounce the best AI agents on complex tasks

State-of-the-industry report finds that, despite the limitations of artificial-intelligence systems, researchers have embraced them.

The case for friction in AI-mediated information seeking and learning

Introduction. This paper challenges the assumption that frictionless AI-mediated information seeking represents progress. We argue that AI systems eliminating productive friction, such as uncertainty, exploration, and reflective processes, undermine intellectual virtues essential for critical thinking in an AI-saturated information environment. Method. This conceptual article employs a theory synthesis approach, drawing on library information science (LIS) theories of information behaviour, experience, and literacy, virtue epistemology, and human–computer interaction (HCI) friction design literature. Analysis. We map intellectual virtues such as curiosity, thoroughness, and intellectual humility onto the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, building on and extending previous analyses. We connect dimensions of virtuous search to AI system design principles and align friction types with specific intellectual virtues. Results. We propose three design principles for human-centred AI systems (representation, affordance, and facilitation) and develop a typology that maps friction interventions to intellectual virtues, providing concrete examples for each. Conclusion. Productive friction should be understood as a feature supporting intellectual development, not a barrier to efficiency. The design choices made today will determine whether AI serves as intellectual scaffolding or cognitive crutch.