resources — Speculative Friction

Speculative Friction in AI design and governance

This page gathers research, books, policy materials, creative methods, and practical tools that inform the Speculative Friction project. These resources explore how friction can be recognized, designed, governed, repaired, or reimagined in the context of AI systems, digital infrastructures, law, creativity, and institutional life.

The list is ongoing and incomplete. It is intended as a living archive for researchers, designers, policymakers, technologists, artists, educators, and anyone interested in building more thoughtful relationships with AI systems.

What has helped you recognize, repair, or reimagine friction in your institutional context or field of practice? Please share any additional materials with us (see the contact info in the About page). This list was last updated on June 1st, 2026.

Start Here

How to use this page? If you are new to Speculative Friction, start by exploring the resources below. If you are designing or evaluating AI systems, explore Friction-in-Design, Law, and Governance, and AI Evaluation, Explainability, and Appropriate Reliance. If you are working on storytelling, workshops, or legal imagination, begin with Speculative Design and Institutional Imagination.

The resources below help define friction not simply as resistance or inconvenience, but as a social, political, organizational, and material force that shapes how people, institutions, technologies, and futures come into relation with one another. Many of them belong to multiple categories, and none of this is intended to be prescriptive but rather instrumental.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. (2011). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press.
Frischmann, Brett M. and Susan Benesch. Friction-In-Design Regulation as 21st Century Time, Place and Manner Restriction. Place and Manner Restriction (2022).
Jenny L. Davis. How artifacts afford: The power and politics of everyday things. MIT Press, 2020.
Hayagreeva Rao and Robert I. Sutton. The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. 2023.

Renée Richardson Gosline. 2022. Why AI Customer Journeys Need More Friction. Harvard Business Review.

Elena Esposito, Katrin Sold, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2021. Systems Theory and Algorithmic Futures: Interview with Elena Esposito. Constructivist Foundations 16, no. 3.

Friction-in-Design, Law, and Governance

These resources connect friction to institutional design, legal intervention, consumer protection, and democratic governance. They are especially useful for thinking about when friction should be reduced, when it should be introduced, and who gets to decide.

Frischmann, Brett M. and Susan Benesch. Friction-In-Design Regulation as 21st Century Time, Place and Manner Restriction. Place and Manner Restriction (2022).
Beuc European Consumer Organisation. An effective choice screen under the Digital Markets Act. 2023.
Carl DiSalvo. Design as democratic inquiry: putting experimental civics into practice. MIT Press, 2022.

Joseph Donia and James A. Shaw. 2021. Co-design and ethical artificial intelligence for health: An agenda for critical research and practice. Big Data & Society 8, 2(2021).

Fiesler, Casey. Ethical considerations for research involving (speculative) public data. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3.GROUP (2019): 1-13.

Kat Holmes. Mismatch: How inclusion shapes design. Mit Press, 2020.

Sunstein, Cass R. Sludge audits. Behavioural Public Policy 6.4 (2022): 654-673.

Kaminski, Margot E. and Urban, Jennifer M., The Right to Contest AI. 2021. Columbia Law Review.

AI Evaluation, Explainability, and Appropriate Reliance

These resources help connect Speculative Friction to AI evaluation, explainability, consent, user understanding, and appropriate trust. They are especially relevant for asking how AI systems should reveal their limits, support contestability, and create space for reflection rather than overreliance.

Upol Ehsan, Q. Vera Liao, Samir Passi, Mark O. Riedl, and Hal Daume III. Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.06753 (2022).

Wilcox, Lauren, Robin Brewer, and Fernando Diaz. AI Consent Futures: A Case Study on Voice Data Collection with Clinicians. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7.CSCW2 (2023): 1-30.
Delgado, Fernando, Stephen Yang, Michael Madaio, and Qian Yang. The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization, pp. 1-23. 2023.
Calo, M. Ryan, Batya Friedman, Tadayoshi Kohno, Hannah Almeter, and Nick Logler. 2020. Telling Stories: On Culturally Responsive Artificial Intelligence. University of Washington Tech Policy Lab.

Speculative Design and Institutional Imagination

These resources support the project’s speculative, critical, and world-building dimensions. They help frame imagination as a serious method for surfacing assumptions, challenging dominant futures, and prototyping alternative institutions, technologies, and social contracts.

Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. Crip Technoscience Manifesto. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
DiSalvo, Carl. 2015. Adversarial design. MIT Press.
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT press.

Forlano, Laura and Anijo Mathew. 2014. From Design Fiction to Design Friction: Speculative and Participatory Design of Values-Embedded Urban Technology. Journal of Urban Technology, Special Issue on Urban Informatics.

Joseph Lindley and Paul Coulton. 2015. Back to the Future: 10 Years of Design Fiction. In Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference (Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom) (British HCI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.

Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon. 2020. AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, Oxford University Press.

Pérez Comisso, Martín, and Dayna Jeffrey. 2023. "Why Decenter Images of the Future Matter: Absences, Alternatives, and Accomplishments Challenging Future Visions." World Futures Review.

Theresa Hice-Fromille and Sarah Papazoglakis. “Diverse Speculative Futures: 2024 Top 10 Reading List.” The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz, 2023.

Tamara Kneese. 2021. Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves. Boundary 2.
Yuk Hui. (2021). Art and cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press.

S. Candy and Watson, J., 2015. The thing from the future. The APF methods anthology London: Association of Professional Futurists.

Harrington, Christina N., Shamika Klassen, and Yolanda A. Rankin. All that You Touch, You Change”: Expanding the Canon of Speculative Design Towards Black Futuring. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2022.
Bray, Kirsten, and Christina Harrington. Speculative blackness: Considering afrofuturism in the creation of inclusive speculative design probes. Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. 2021.

Harrington, Christina, and Tawanna R. Dillahunt. Eliciting tech futures among Black young adults: A case study of remote speculative co-design. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2021.
Khan, Awais Hameed, et al. Speculative design for education: Using participatory methods to map design challenges and opportunities in Pakistan. Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 2021.

Coming Soon and Contributions

This resource page will continue to grow, expanding into a more practical toolkit for recognizing, mapping, and transforming friction in AI systems and governance contexts.

This is a living archive. If there is a book, article, policy document, artwork, game, legal concept, design method, or practical tool that has shaped how you think about friction in the context of AI design and governance, creativity, or institutional imagination, I would love to hear about it (see the contact info in the About page).