Abstract
This paper examines how design can restore cognitive and sensory depth within a culture shaped by frictionless digitality. The dominance of frictionless design—defined by speed, ease, and seamlessness—has optimized usability but diminished the experiential conditions that make meaning possible. Meaning emerges through resistance: the effort, uncertainty, and interpretive engagement that activate attention and reward. Drawing on embodied cognition and semiotic theory, the paper argues that cognitive effort and sensory resistance are essential to perception and value. Physical and spatial artefacts, through material texture, spatial articulation, and perceptual complexity, can reintroduce friction into everyday experience, inviting interpretive participation rather than passive consumption. In contrast to predictive systems that externalize thought, such design restores the dialogue between body, mind, and environment. The proposed aesthetics of resistance reframes aesthetic as cognitive grip rather than ease, outlining an ecology of effort through which resistance becomes a source of meaning for user experience.
Keywords
Aesthetics of Resistance; Ecology of Effort; Cognitive Semiotics; Embodied Cognition; Meaningful Experience.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.535
Citation
Caggiano, S. (2026) The Ecology of Effort: Aesthetics of Resistance in the Age of Frictionless Design, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.535
Creative Commons License
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Included in
The Ecology of Effort: Aesthetics of Resistance in the Age of Frictionless Design
This paper examines how design can restore cognitive and sensory depth within a culture shaped by frictionless digitality. The dominance of frictionless design—defined by speed, ease, and seamlessness—has optimized usability but diminished the experiential conditions that make meaning possible. Meaning emerges through resistance: the effort, uncertainty, and interpretive engagement that activate attention and reward. Drawing on embodied cognition and semiotic theory, the paper argues that cognitive effort and sensory resistance are essential to perception and value. Physical and spatial artefacts, through material texture, spatial articulation, and perceptual complexity, can reintroduce friction into everyday experience, inviting interpretive participation rather than passive consumption. In contrast to predictive systems that externalize thought, such design restores the dialogue between body, mind, and environment. The proposed aesthetics of resistance reframes aesthetic as cognitive grip rather than ease, outlining an ecology of effort through which resistance becomes a source of meaning for user experience.