Designing for Friction, Not Flow
Not all resistance is a failure of design. Some friction is protective, instructive, even necessary. This essay explores why designing for smoothness often breaks under real-world constraints—and why the right kind of friction can make systems, bodies, and decisions more resilient.
There is a persistent fantasy embedded in modern design culture: that the best systems are frictionless.
Smooth. Elegant. Effortless.
We celebrate flow states, seamless interfaces, and invisible infrastructure. When something resists us, we assume it is broken. When something slows us down, we assume it needs optimization.
I no longer believe that.
Training again, with a body shaped by injury and adaptation, has forced me to confront a harder truth: some friction is not a flaw. It is information.
My body offers constant feedback now. Not always politely. Pain, fatigue, hesitation, imbalance. These are not signals to be ignored or engineered away. They are constraints that must be designed with, not around.
This is as true in physical systems as it is in organizations.
Many of the failures I’ve seen in healthcare, technology, and social systems come from mistaking resistance for inefficiency. We design as if people are abstractions. As if context is noise. As if the real world should behave more like the model.
It never does.
On the bike, friction shows up immediately. You feel it in your feet, your cadence, your breathing. You cannot intellectualize your way past it. You must respond. Adjust posture. Change pacing. Choose differently.
That is what makes it honest.
I’m beginning to see this phase of my life as a deliberate reintroduction of friction. Not to suffer for its own sake, but to recover sensitivity. To rebuild judgment. To regain trust in feedback that cannot be gamed.
Design that ignores friction creates brittle systems.
Design that listens to it creates resilient ones.
This is what I’m practicing now. On the bike. In my work. In the quiet restructuring of my days.
Not chasing flow, but learning when resistance is telling me something essential.
Ken Wake is a designer-philosopher, entrepreneur, EIR and Professor at Georgetown University, and founder of Watershed LLC. He is training for the 2,745-mile Tour Divide before he turns 50.