We eradicated friction – now we want it back

Some years back, my eye-on-society friend Mikkel wrote a thought-provoking LinkedIn piece on hassle.¹ He argued that we live in the Age of No Hassle: designing everything to reduce friction as much as possible. No hassle as the ultimate ideal for designers and no hassle as the expectation from the user. Mikkel's description of the effects of the hassle free made me reflect on situations from my own life, like when I had been leaving products behind in online carts because I couldn’t be bothered filling out my credit-card number. “Oh Lord,” my brain moaned, “do I really have to tell these people my password / user id / first pet’s name? Don’t they know who I am?” as Mikkel wittily writes.¹

The piece made me think of how the friction-free world has made my life better, but also more distracted. What if I would rather have read a book instead of taking the easy option of binging on Netflix? Perhaps I could save a lot of money if I wasn’t primed to purchase stuff all the time on Instagram. And it dawned on me that it has come to a point where it feels eccentric to spend traveling time watching the landscape pass by instead of doomscrolling.

In Denmark, we invest immensely in smoothing out life in the name of efficiency and capitalism. I can’t help but feel like a bit of a useful idiot in that game, doing my part to make life smoother without asking why. Being a designer myself, I was brought up on books like The Design of Everyday Things², where the goal is to make the experience of dealing with a design object or service as pleasant and seamless as possible. The sentiment is that if you have to figure out how to use it, it’s bad design. But lately, I wonder if that’s always the case? What if “user-friendly” has turned manipulative and what if my own designs have too?

Being the wayfinding nerds we are

One morning, I was having coffee with fellow designer and colleague Rosemary and the subject of hassle and friction in design came up. Rosemary, who, freshly back from Lebanon, burst out: “If Denmark is friction-free, Lebanon is the epiphany of friction”. Our conversation drifts to wayfinding design as a tool to eradicate friction in navigation. A passage from the book Jordbo pops into my mind. Author Emmy Laura Peres Fjalland captures the shift to friction free navigation so precisely: 

“I can vaguely remember the time when we had to look at a map and memorize the route. The time when we described the way to the party to one another. Sketched it on a scrap of paper, asked someone for directions along the way, and looked around us. Sometimes we got lost. We arrived late, but usually found our way in the end.

They said GPS would give us more space to enjoy the journey — and help us better remember the places we moved through. But now they say we’ve grown inattentive, letting ourselves be led as if blind. We’re unlearning an entire language for knowing where we are in the world, and research shows we’re losing the cognitive abilities we once used to orient ourselves. The ability to navigate the world.” ³ 

In Beirut, where Rosemary grew up, GPS wasn’t a very effective tool which, I wonder, if that means that the citizen’s natural flair for wayfinding hasn’t been corrupted. She goes on telling me stories about chaos, adaptation and navigating like a pilot in Star Wars.

Rosemary was young when she started sneaking out to test her parents’ car. In the early 2000s, traffic lights either didn’t exist or, if they did, no one bothered with them. The roads were, and still are, uneven, full of bumps and potholes, with sidewalks that function more as parking spots than pavements. She tells me about an incident driving down a narrow alleyway. She did a quick calculation of geometry, time, space and speed, zigging out of her lane to tell another driver off, then zagging back again to avoid a full-frontal crash with a third car coming at her. The thrill of driving pumped through her veins.

She explained it felt like having a sixth sense for spatial prediction, as if she could read the body language of other cars while feeling every inch of her own. “It gave me a kind of freedom. It sharpened my instincts in a way I don’t feel would happen here, where people follow traffic signs as if they were a moral compass.” She continues to assure me that, of course she’s not advocating or romanticising traffic chaos.

Her adventurous tales reminded me of other natural navigators I had read stories of in books about ancient wayfinding. Like the Polynesian seafarers who could find secluded and widely scattered islands in a vast ocean with needle precision.⁴ They navigated by reading their surroundings and memorising star constellations like others memorise song lyrics. What fascinates me most is how the ship was described as an extension of the body, and how the navigator would feel east-west directions from the rhythms of the waves.⁴ It’s what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might call an embodied way of knowing; reading the world through the body rather than the mind.⁵  I think this is exactly what wayfinding should be like, and I wonder if and how we can bring even a pinch of that back into our friction-free lives.

The effective brain

The task of wayfinding can be stressful, frustrating and difficult. It’s a task full of friction that requires you to learn, think and make decisions. In Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we learn how the brain optimises its energy consumption by switching between two systems of thought: system 1 is fast and intuitive; system 2 is slow and deliberate.⁶

Within the realm of wayfinding, system 1 means you intuitively follow the clues you’ve spent a lifetime adopting, like assuming the main entrance is the most significant door on a building, or reading a crowd of people as a sign that you’re close to the concert hall you were looking for. If the clues aren’t there, your brain shifts to system 2, which requires active thinking. You might recall being at the hospital, scanning your way through a long list of alien department names with arrows pointing in all directions. You try to figure it out, but active thinking requires a lot of energy and makes the blood sugar spike⁶, so the brain does the most effective thing: finds someone to ask for help. Being compelled to perform the least demanding task, is presumably why GPS has become everyone’s go to tool for finding their way.

Some call this the work of the “lazy brain”, but if you perceive it as energy optimization evolved from a long era of energy scarcity, it’s simply smart engineering. In this well-oiled world, our designs have eradicated the friction of navigation to the point where the brain can lounge out in system 1 and I wonder what happens when we no longer need to switch to system 2? 

Friction makes us smarter

Long before the age of “turn left in 200 meters”, London taxi drivers were living proof that friction exercises the brain.⁷ Because they didn’t have the aid of GPS, navigating the same city over and over again led to the development of a detailed map in their minds. A team of neuro researchers were curious whether such a “mental map” would be detectable, and to their astonishment, a series of MRI scans revealed that the drivers had in fact enlarged hippocampi compared to control groups.⁷ The hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for memory and navigation. The hippocampi of the taxi drivers were literally bulked up like a brain’s bicep. Just like a muscle, more training meant a larger hippocampus, leaving drivers with bigger ones7  

Unfortunately it seems that the opposite also holds true. A lack of exercise for the brain causes smaller hippocampi, and sadly, this is often correlated with Alzheimer’s diagnoses.⁸ It seems like it’s a case of “use it or lose it” with our sense of direction and memory on the line.

But what about the quality of the experience when you’re finding your way? With a lot of projects in the recreational sector, I was curious to find out if there was any “hard evidence” on what leads to the richest and most fulfilling journey. To my satisfaction, I discovered a small Australian study that set up three groups for comparison: one using a paper map, one following GPS, and one relying on signage.⁹ Because I personally have a thing for bespoke maps, I was pleased to read that the map group was best on all parameters: they got there fastest even though the route they chose was the longest and they “retained the best knowledge of the environment”.⁹ In other words, they got to know the place well, because when you read a map you have to constantly look up, compare landmarks, and decide whether to go one way or the other. 

The signage group came in second. And the GPS group? They failed on every parameter. A seemingly smooth ride, you’d think, but apart from missing out on experiencing the town with their own eyes, they didn’t even feel reassured that they were going the right way.⁹ So while user-friendliness is what we usually strive for, it might sometimes be a quiet form of cognitive atrophy – and getting lost, making choices, comparing paths – that little bit of friction keeps our wires active and alert, and might actually make us smarter and our memories sharper.

Reading maps

When I was younger, my soldier-sister introduced me to orienteering, a sport where you compete on locating a number of posts the fastest using only a map and a compass. Every other week, together with a group of friends, I found myself in an unfamiliar forest, running around under the pressure of swarming mosquitos and the prospect of defeat (My sister always came in first, the rest of the group in the middle, and me last). To guide you, there’s a paper map dense with topographical clues: highs and lows of the landscape, curvatures of barely visible footpaths and markings of the different types of forests and trees. The most difficult place to navigate was in Western Jutland, where oak plantations keep the sand dunes in check by drowning the trunks in sand, making you move in a surreal world of tree crowns. One place became so densely vegetated that I could converse with one of my fellow orienteering buddies as if we were face to face, but with no clue of where or in which direction he stood. To navigate, I had to constantly dissect the green wall to match the map. I was in a deep reflective state and, with no lifeline to turn to, I got lost more often than not. After a lot of effort, I got better at navigating using a paper map, and gained skills like ‘feeling’ the distance on the map, comparing features to the environment more effectively and memorising routes. The task became less system 2 and more system 1.

Actually it didn’t – I expected it to, but in reality, I was still terrible at memorising the map and constantly had to pick it up and look at it again every ten meters. Despite my, to this day, lack of flair for orienteering, I don’t feel my struggles were in vain at all. Even though I can’t memorise the map, I know how to read it. And even though I don’t always read it right, experiencing the world through maps made me gain an intimate knowledge of the Danish forests and how they work. I believe that map reading really does evoke a deep understanding of the surroundings. The corrections, the uncertainties, the effort; all the friction was sharpening my attention. It forced me to see more, notice more and think more. It also forced me to run through twenty meters of spider web like there was no tomorrow, just to get a head start. Completely in vain of course – no one beats the soldier. Her competitive gene is as bulked up as I assume her hippocampus is. But I didn’t really mind. Orienteering for me was about the adventure and the community we build around it.

Frictionful wayfinding as a driver for community

Orienteering isn’t the only way frictionful wayfinding brings people together. If you’ve been to the Roskilde Festival camp site, you’ll know that it’s quite immense and chaotic. Every year, when I pass it on the motorway, the countless tents and white canopies laid out in parallel squares resemble a dotted quilt. Navigation at the Roskilde Festival site is another epiphany of friction and because of it, creativity is let loose and almost every camp there crafts their own local landmark. 

When I was younger, I remember my camp raised a spur-of-the-moment Fernet Branca flag that was only really visible for those who knew what to look for. For long-distance navigation, I depended on the bold creativity of other camps, like the life-size whale pavilion of Fest-i-hval (party in whale), where I once ran into an old classmate known for wearing a tin as a hat. Or Kussemosen (cunt-moor), the girl-boss camp named after a 70s feminist group. When I reached that point I knew it meant I was nearly back to my own camp. 

The most (in)famous camp landmark has to be Alien og Ko (Alien and cow): an odd couple of balloons raised to the top of a pole that, when stomped, made the pair move in a suggestive sexual manner. The camp members brought Alien og Ko to concerts, elevating it from a mere camp marker to a moving landmark that everyone would use as a fix point in the sea of people in front of the Orange stage. 

Alien og Ko is celebrating its 25 year anniversary this year¹⁰, and among many fun facts you can read how the Danish band Minds of 99 refused to go on, shouting “Where the hell is Alien and Cow?” moments before showtime. Alien og Ko rushed from another concert so that the show could go on. Today, Alien og Ko is a registered trademark. A cultish heirloom we wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for frictionful wayfinding. 

I think Roskilde Festival is the ultimate example of how frictional wayfinding becomes a driver for creativity, identity and community. Of course the circumstances are unique, but people’s motivation to create, and their strategies to navigate are not. I wonder how, within the design solutions we offer, we could mimic some of those dynamics in other parts of society…

Designers of all disciplines have spent decades trying to smooth the world, to make it seamless. I enjoy the seamless, I embrace it, I take advantage of it in my daily life. But when the apparent “user-friendly” steals our attention and ultimately damages our health, we should consider introducing the kind of friction that encourages creativity and has a hint of  adventure.