In Defense Of Friction: Designing for agency through constructivist entanglements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to interrogate and reframe the role of friction in design from a separate and isolated phenomenon that hampers a system to one that emerges from the entangled interactions between objects and their environments and serves as a valuable feedback cycle within the system. This feedback can teach us how to facilitate more equitable experience ecosystems where agency is organically empowered to emerge instead of granted or allowed. To this end, design is overdue for a constructivist turn as a counterbalance to cognitivist and behaviourist modes of thinking. Constructivist approaches necessarily rejigger the relationships between designer and designed and reframe their interactions as emergent entanglements rather than linear dynamics. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Friere, Mezirow, Barad, and others, this presentation explores and synthesises key ideas from agential realism, transformative learning theory, and liberation pedagogy through a constructivist, systems-oriented lens to identify themes with great potential for the work of systemic designers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.068 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".