In Tension with Progression: Grasping the Frictional Tendencies of Speculative, Critical, and other Alternative Designs

Speculative design, critical design, and other alternative designs have emerged as popular approaches and burgeoning traditions within HCI and design research. While examples of this work abound, comparatively little theory exists for grasping alternative designs, and for explicating their relation to other types of design and to design in general. In response this paper develops the key concepts of progressional design, frictional design, and design as prefiguration. The progressional conceptualization of design holds that designs have a primary purpose, and that purpose is to ultimately converge toward and ideally arrive at production. The frictional conceptualization of design radically relaxes teleological assumptions and productional expectations. Frictional designs prefigure possibilities that are compellingly resistant to further progression and final production. Prefiguration grounds both progression and friction in the idea that designs are partial, provisional, and potentially preliminary actualizations of possible futures. To illustrate frictional design, this paper outlines a framework of 5 frictional tendencies: diverging, opposing, accelerating, counterfactualizing, and analogizing. These tendencies represent ways in which frictional designs are directionally in tension with the arrow-like vector of progressional design. Several additional concepts are discussed in conclusion to further explicate more nuanced relational potentials between friction and progression: transproductional uses, teleological ambiguity, and relational multiplicity.