Written by Emma Baumhofer.
Image credit: author.
Standing on a central Taipei street corner, I’m at an intersection framed by a mix of apartments and small businesses. In early October, it’s still hot and humid after sunset. It’s the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the full moon is visible between buildings. I’m gradually joined by neighbours arriving in twos and threes; some chat, the rest of us scroll on our phones or take a seat on nearby stairs. The atmosphere feels lightly communal. Eventually, the iconic, ringtone-like sound of Für Elise grows louder as the yellow garbage truck ambles up the street, and we gather around with our blue garbage bags and bundles of recycling. This is trash time. Unlike the curbside or dumpster models common in many countries, Taiwan’s approach requires residents to meet the truck at a fixed time and place to dispose of waste.
In my neighbourhood, trash time is 7:30 PM, five nights a week. This is inconvenient for me since I’m often out of the house or preparing dinner at this time, but as a visitor, it’s also thrilling to participate in this unusual (for me) and mundane ritual. The friction forces a slowdown. It turns a purely instrumental task into a moment of shared city life: recognition, micro-interactions, and the small pleasure of participating in a norm I did not grow up with.
Roman Mars, host of the design podcast 99% Invisible, argues that the “march to make things more and more efficient” makes the world worse, and that we should always “allow for great deals of inefficiency in design systems” because “frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world”. I agree. Treating efficiency as the primary metric is bad design when it weakens social ties and concentrates power. Taiwan’s trash system is one of the most efficient in the world, but the user experience is tricky since I’m required to be in a particular place and time to do something I normally do on my own schedule. This “annoying” constraint also produces cultural texture and a subtle sense of being part of a collective routine.
The cultural cost of frictionless design
Across contemporary products and services, the default goal is a frictionless experience: fewer clicks, instant delivery, automated decisions, and invisible mediation. In the best cases, this reduces burdens and expands access. In digital environments, speed and engagement become proxies for quality and meaning. The easiest actions: resharing, reacting, and commenting, feel inconsequential because they are effortless. Yet in aggregate, they amplify misinformation, incentivise virality, reward outrage, and erode social trust.
This is not only a platform problem. When products train us to expect zero friction, everyday encounters with other people become harder to tolerate: the slowness of a line, the unpredictability of public space, or the fact that other people do not optimise around our preferences. Cities and democracies are shared systems. If we design our way into a culture that cannot tolerate friction, we weaken our capacity to coexist.
Good friction through a positive peace lens
Peace studies distinguishes between negative peace (the absence of direct violence) and positive peace (the presence of social conditions that enable people to navigate disagreement without domination, exclusion, or harm). Positive peace is not conflict-free; it is conflict-capable, supported by norms and institutions that make it possible to disagree, repair, and keep living together.
In design and policy, “friction” is often synonymous with defects: cognitive load, delays, confusing forms, and needless steps. Some frictions are clearly harmful. Bureaucratic hurdles that keep people out of services, opaque processes that punish newcomers, and inaccessible interfaces that intimidate participation should be reduced or removed. But other frictions are protective and prosocial. They create pauses before harm spreads, structure exchanges to reward listening, and build repeated low stakes encounters that accumulate into familiarity. “Good friction” is a design parameter that can support the conditions of positive peace. Taipei’s night markets embody this: dominantly cash-based transactions, dense crowds, negotiating space—inefficiencies that slow commerce but create cross-class encounters and sustained neighbourhood vitality. The practical design question becomes: which frictions enable coexistence, and which prevent it?
Friction by design in Taiwan’s deliberation ecosystem
Taiwan’s civic-tech community offers concrete examples of friction as deliberation design. vTaiwan, a hybrid consultation process that combines online and offline participation, uses tools such as Pol.is to collect and map public opinion and to help groups reach “hidden consensus”. The aspiration is not to eliminate disagreement, but to make the landscape of viewpoints legible enough to support negotiation.
Pol.is constrains interaction in ways that social platforms do not. Participants vote on community-contributed statements without direct replies, eliminating trolling dynamics while keeping participation lightweight. This is friction by design, making some behaviours harder (pile-ons, direct antagonism) and others easier (registering a position anonymously, without performing identity). That trade-off is cultural as much as technical. When designers choose what is easy, they shape what becomes normal.
Recent governance writing argues that civic systems need to be more ‘friction-rich’ to support democratic sense-making. Design friction moves into policy as deliberate barriers—forwarding limits, ‘read before sharing’ prompts—to prevent harm and promote reflection. But friction can be weaponised if it disproportionately burdens some users.
Taiwan’s opportunity
Taiwan’s digital democracy and technology innovation ecosystems are fertile ground for becoming a global reference point for prosocial design. I encountered impressive initiatives shaped by Taiwan’s particular history and geopolitical position. While Silicon Valley remains a global centre for frictionless, attention-maximising products, Taiwan has an opportunity to represent a different design ambition: prosocial systems that treat friction as a tool for social resilience.
To do this, Taiwan would need to pair its technical excellence with a deeper commitment to positive peace as lived experience, not just a strategic concept. Taiwan has done important transitional justice work—I spent time at the National Human Rights Museum and with Fred Chin, a White Terror survivor whose testimony refuses the convenience of forgetting. This work models the friction democratic societies need: sustained encounters with uncomfortable truths and plural narratives. The same principle applies to other marginalised experiences—women, indigenous communities, migrant workers, and people with disabilities. Friction-rich design must centre those for whom daily friction is already high and rarely prosocial, or it risks reinforcing existing exclusions.
Hackathons and civic design sprints, common in Taiwan’s tech ecosystem, could become laboratories for friction practice. These events already create productive constraints: tight timelines, diverse teams, and stakeholder accountability. Reframed as relationship infrastructure rather than solution factories, they offer a structured way to practice the capacities pluralistic societies require: engaging with big issues, navigating disagreement with strangers, translating across expertise and values, and staying in conversation under pressure. The friction is the point, not a bug to optimise away.
Conclusion: design for cohesion, not just convenience
Rubbing shoulders with neighbours, being subject to shared constraints, encountering the different rhythms and needs of others—these frictions create the texture of civic life. They’re what give us space to think before reacting, to recognise rather than optimise around each other.
A positive-peace approach to design asks: where should we remove friction to expand participation, and where should we add friction to protect mutual understanding? This is more demanding than optimising for speed. It requires designers, policymakers, and civic technologists to treat “user experience” as social experience—measuring success not only by convenience, but by cohesion. Taiwan’s civic tech community has already demonstrated that this is possible. The question is whether it can become the default rather than the exception.
Emma Baumhofer is a transdisciplinary designer, peacebuilder, and researcher based in Lugano, Switzerland. Her work explores how technology, history, and place impact culture and global issues. In her peacebuilding practice, she works closely with experts in gender, mediation, and transitional justice to understand how technology impacts different communities in conflict and how to leverage digital tools for greater impact. As a designer, she’s interested in more-than-human perspectives and exploring how friction can help support resilient communities.