Creative technology has always promised to make things easier.
- Undo.
- Copy.
- Paste.
- Templates.
- Auto-layout.
- Generative fill.
- Text-to-image.
- Prompt-to-video.
There is an understandable appeal in removing unnecessary effort.
But I have started wondering whether we sometimes remove something useful along with it.
Friction.
My doctoral research contains a strangely literal example of this.
When writing and drawing on early tablet screens, I became interested in the physical difference between glass and paper. The glass surface was slippery. Paper provided resistance. That friction created additional sensory feedback and greater control over the movement of the stylus.
I now think about creative friction in much the same way.
Not all difficulty is valuable.
Bad interfaces, inaccessible tools and repetitive tasks can simply make creative work frustrating.
But some forms of resistance make us engage.
- Learning a new skill.
- Struggling to express an idea.
- Making a bad first attempt.
- Changing direction.
- Working within a constraint.
- Drawing something rather than searching for it.
- Trying again.
These moments slow the process enough for decisions to occur.
My earlier research repeatedly moved between repetition and play. Repetition alone became monotonous. But when experimentation was introduced, the same skill-building became personally meaningful.
That distinction feels important now.
The goal should not be to make creativity unnecessarily difficult.
It should be to ask:
Which difficulties are getting in the way, and which difficulties are helping us learn?
AI complicates this question because it can remove creative friction extraordinarily quickly.
- Don't know what the composition should be? Generate six.
- Can't think of a concept? Ask for twenty.
- Can't visualise an idea? Produce it immediately.
Sometimes that is exactly what we need.
But if the machine repeatedly enters the process before we have struggled with the question ourselves, we may also lose opportunities to develop judgement, confidence and creative independence.
Perhaps creative friction is not something we should automatically eliminate. Sometimes it is the resistance that gives us something to push against.