In Praise of Inconvenience: rethinking frictionless experience
- Publication Type:
- Conference Proceeding
- Citation:
- AMPS Proceedings Series 18.1, 2020, 18.1, pp. 173-180
- Issue Date:
- 2020-01-01
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
Convenience, or effortless experience, is a central principle of ‘good design’. Its origins can be found in the Vitruvian virtue of utilitas (utility) and more recently as Modernist functionalism. Taylorism’s systematising of labour processes in the early 20th century aligned the idea of fitness-for-purpose to a capitalist concern with efficiency. The emergence of usability in the 1980s with its focus on the user and first-person experience foregrounded a more expansive notion of convenience: the more invisible and affectively neutral an interaction the better.
Central to this idea of the convenient is effortlessness; interactions that provide frictionless experiences while minimising cognitive load. This paper traces the origins of this thinking and outlines two dominant critiques that have emerged from the fields of human-computer interaction and critical design.
Drawing on the overlap between Western mindfulness research and Buddhist methodologies for attention regulation—and the insistence of both on the benefits of present-centered focus—this paper asserts that the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself. It argues that designers might strategically employ the inconvenient to immerse people in the richness of the present moment, favouring felt agency over efficient yet textureless interactions.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: