Friction — prototyping a future keyboard

Different crew this time: Haley Potter, Miami Celentana and me, at Figma's FigBuild. The brief was open-ended, so we deleted the constraints and used the event to imagine what a keyboard could be if it wasn't just a dumb input device.

Most feedback from a computer comes back as more information, like a warning, a notification, a timer, or a number turning red. We tried making the feedback physical instead. A key could get harder to press. The wrist rest could change temperature. Instead of giving you another thing to look at, the thing you're already touching would change.

My part was mostly high-fidelity interaction work. I wanted to get really specific about what happens when the state changes: what moves, what becomes obvious, what the user can override, and what happens when the system is wrong.

Here's the prototype. It's a pretend Windows laptop with Friction running on it. The sliders on the left stand in for the sensors, and the three stories walk through what Friction does.

This is the deck we made for it. Arrow keys or swipe to move through it.

The broader research came out of some of the same cognitive-load questions behind Clay/Gyrus, but Friction took the interaction down into the keyboard and the operating system. We didn't build the final keyboard during the event, and we missed the submission.