In Praise of Friction: What Japanese Craft Taught Me About Making Things That Matter

TL;DR: The Friction Is the Point

The Problem: We’ve built an entire technology industry around eliminating friction. By doing so, we may have eliminated something essential. And will do more.

The Argument: The resistance you feel when working with your hands. Examples of clay that pushes back, lacquer that demands patience, and wood grain that refuses to comply aren’t　inefficiencies. It’s the mechanism through which meaning is made.

The Insight: Mingei, the Japanese philosophy of everyday craft, understood this long before “UX” was a word. And it has something urgent to say to anyone building products in 2026.

The time I made a bowl, the clay pushed back in ways I didn’t expect. There’s a moment where you genuinely can’t tell if you’re shaping the clay, or if it’s shaping you. What came out of the kiln was lopsided, uneven-walled, with a rim that curled in ways I hadn’t planned.

I thought about the process of making things the way I drive back home.

The Efficiency Trap

In my previous piece on AI and UX, I argued that the real revolution in human-computer interaction won’t come from AI alone. It’ll come from whether our interfaces can finally transcend the screen. But there’s a related argument I’ve thought about since that afternoon at the pottery wheel.

What if the removal of friction is the wrong goal entirely?

The technology industry has made friction its primary enemy. Reduce the clicks. Shorten the path from intent to outcome. And in many contexts, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, filing taxes, finding a flight, I believe this is genuinely good.

But there’s a different category of friction. The friction of making something. The friction of understanding something. The friction of earning something. And when we apply the same logic that eliminates, smooths, and optimizes to these experiences, we don’t make them better. We hollow them out.

The lopsided bowl taught me simply that what you’ve designed doesn’t come out the way you imagined.

Growing Up in Asakusa

I need to tell you about where I grew up, because it’s impossible to separate my thinking on craft from the streets that shaped it.

Asakusa is one of Tokyo’s oldest neighborhoods. Asakusa is the kind of place where Edo-era culture didn’t just survive the 20th century, it kept going, quietly, like a current beneath the modern city. As a kid, this meant that craft wasn’t museum content but more of the texture of daily life (and seeing many Yakuza in town daily).

Every year, the Sanja Matsuri (feel free to check it out on YouTube) fills the streets as one of Japan’s largest and most energetic festivals. It is a spectacle of intense heat, loud shouting, and occasional fights. It is also one of the rare times you can see the yakuza openly, showing their tattoos as they lead the crowd with a strong, tough authority. Across three days, nearly two million people gather, and at the center of it all are the mikoshi: portable shrines carried through the neighborhood on the shoulders of dozens of people at once. What you might not notice, unless you grew up watching them, is how those shrines are made.

Not far from the festival grounds, Miyamoto Unosuke Shoten has been operating since the Edo period. They make taiko drums and mikoshi, and festival instruments in the most literal sense, objects built to carry sacred weight through crowds of thousands, for generation after generation. The carpentry techniques involved come from the tradition of miyadaiku, shrine carpenters, craftspeople who developed their methods not in response to aesthetic preference but in response to necessity. Japan’s geography, about 80% of the land is mountainous or hilly, the seismic activity, the extreme humidity swings, people live with traditional woodworking solved by working with the material’s nature rather than against it.

I remember pressing my hand against a mikoshi as a child, feeling the warmth of the lacquered wood, the way the surface seemed to hold light differently than anything synthetic. I didn’t have language for what I was sensing. I do now: it was the feeling of accumulated intelligence. Generations of makers solving the same problem, passing forward everything they’d learned, embedded in the object itself. Every culture has its version of this.

In a world where 3D-printed houses are a commercial offering, I’d argue it’s something closer to irreplaceable infrastructure, not because we need to build this way, but because the knowledge of how encodes something we cannot afford to lose.

What Mingei Understood

This brings me to a word I want you to know, if you don’t already: mingei.

Mingei (民藝) — literally “art of the people”. It is a philosophy and aesthetic movement founded in 1920s Japan by philosopher Sōetsu Yanagi, along with potters Shōji Hamada and Kanjirō Kawai. Its central claim was quietly radical: the most beautiful objects are not fine art created by famous artists for wealthy patrons. They are the everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople for ordinary use — bowls, tools, fabrics, baskets. Objects whose beauty emerges not from the maker’s ego but from the accumulated wisdom of the tradition, and from the honest relationship between material, function, and human need.

Yanagi was writing in a specific historical moment. Industrialization was flooding Japan with cheap manufactured goods, and the traditional craft workshops that had produced everyday objects for centuries were dying. Mingei was partly an act of preservation, but it was also a philosophical argument: that the industrial object, optimized for cost and production speed, had severed the relationship between making and meaning.

I think about this argument constantly when I’m working on digital products.

Mingei didn’t fetishize difficulty for its own sake. A well-made wooden rice scoop isn’t beautiful because it was hard to produce; it’s beautiful because every design decision was made in direct response to a real need, refined over time by makers who used the objects themselves. The friction of the craft was the mechanism of refinement. You cannot iterate on an object you’ve never held.

Lacquer

I want to spend a moment on lacquer, because it’s the craft that I find most quietly radical in the current moment.

Urushi — Japanese lacquer — is a material of extraordinary contradiction. It is harvested from the sap of the toxicodendron vernicifluum tree (…what?), is toxic until fully cured, requires careful temperature and humidity control during application, and demands multiple layers applied and polished over days or weeks. It is, by any modern manufacturing logic, absurdly inefficient.

It is also one of the most beautiful and durable surface materials humanity has ever produced, naturally antimicrobial, food-safe, and capable of lasting centuries with proper care. My lacquered chopsticks and bowls are not acquisitions; they are commitments.

Yes, we have modern chemical coatings that protect wooden utensils. We have food-safe plastics and silicones that are far easier to produce at scale. If your only metric is functional adequacy. Does it hold food without leaching? These alternatives qualify.

But there’s a specific experience of eating with lacquered utensils that nothing synthetic replicates. The way the surface feels against your lip. The weight of a well-made lacquered bowl in your hand. The knowledge, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that this object was made carefully.

And there’s a detail that I think has profound implications for how we think about product design: honey. You should never stir honey with a metal spoon. The metal can interact with the enzymes in raw honey, and more practically, the thermal conductivity of the metal causes issues with temperature-sensitive preparations. A wooden honey dipper works. But when it comes to a lacquered spoon? It’s the ideal tool. Inert, smooth, durable, beautiful. The solution arrived by centuries of people solving the problem of “how do we handle food beautifully and safely” with whatever the natural world offered.

What would it mean to build software products with this logic? To ask not “what’s the minimum viable experience” but “what is the version of this that could last for a generation”?

The Kiln, and the Irreversibility Problem

There’s something about ceramics that software genuinely cannot replicate. When you throw a pot, each decision is provisional until it isn’t, and then it goes into the kiln, and the kiln does what the kiln does. You cannot undo this. There is no A/B test.

Software’s gift is the ability to iterate, to revert, to test everything against everything else — it is also its curse. When nothing is permanent, nothing fully commits. The craftsperson who knows the glaze is the glaze makes a different kind of decision than the product team that knows they can fix it in the next sprint.

The bowl I made is lopsided. It sits on my shelf not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s mine in a way that nothing digital has ever been.

Objects That Hold Memory

There’s a deeper current running beneath all of this that I want to name directly.

In Japan, you encounter early, sometimes without being formally taught, the idea that things can hold spirit. Tsukumogami, the spirits said to inhabit objects that have been used and cared for a hundred years. The Shinto concept that the sacred is not separate from the material world, but present within it. In everything. In old trees, in rivers, in the worn handle of a tool that has passed through many hands. Growing up in Asakusa, where the mikoshi carries through streets that have seen four centuries of the same ritual. This isn’t mythology. It’s the texture of ordinary life.

I don’t think you need to accept the literal theology to find something true in the underlying intuition: that objects accumulate meaning through use, that long-lived things carry something that new things don’t, that the relationship between a person and a well-made object deepens over time rather than degrading.

This is what the lacquered bowl, the taiko drum, and the mikoshi built by miyadaiku hands all have in common. They are not optimized for a single moment of use. They are made to be passed on. They get better, more beautiful as they age. The urushi surface develops roiro, a deeper luster that only emerges after years of handling and careful maintenance. You cannot manufacture this. You can only earn it through time and attention.

Against this, consider the dominant logic of modern product design: devices engineered to be replaced in two years, platforms optimized for engagement over depth, interfaces smooth enough that nothing sticks. We have become extraordinarily good at making things that are easy to pick up and easy to put down.

The generational artifact asks a different question: What are we making that’s worth keeping?

What This Means for What We Build

I’m not making an argument for Luddism. I use AI tools every day! I think about interface design constantly. I believe in the genuine promise of technology to solve hard problems.

But I think we are in a moment where the dominant logic, remove friction, increase speed, optimize for completion…is producing a specific kind of poverty. Products that work flawlessly and mean nothing. Interactions that are smooth and leave no residue. Tools that are powerful and make you feel, somehow, less capable when you put them down.

The craftspeople of Asakusa, the mingei potters of rural Japan, and the urushi artists working today in Wajima and Kyoto. They are not preserving the past. They are demonstrating a different theory of value. That slowness can be a design choice. That resistance can be a feature. The object made with care has a relationship with its user that the optimized object cannot achieve.

I don’t know exactly what this looks like when translated into a digital product strategy. But I suspect it involves asking, before every simplification: what is the friction doing? Is it friction we should remove? Or is it friction that’s doing work like creating understanding, building competence, and establishing a relationship between user and tool that matters?

The clay pushes back. That’s not a bug. I think that’s how you learn what you’re doing.

FAQ

Q: What is mingei, and why is it relevant to technology design? A: Mingei (民藝) is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy, developed in the 1920s by Sōetsu Yanagi, that locates beauty in everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople for ordinary use. Its relevance to technology is its central argument: that when the distance between maker and material becomes too great — when optimization overtakes intention — something essential is lost. For product designers, mingei suggests asking whether the friction in an experience serves a purpose before eliminating it.

Q: What does “productive friction” mean in UX? A: Productive friction refers to the resistance in an experience that generates understanding, builds competence, or creates meaning — as opposed to friction that’s simply wasteful or obstructive. A complex onboarding flow that teaches users how a tool works is productive friction. A broken checkout process is not. The distinction matters because modern UX philosophy often treats all friction as bad, leading to experiences that are fast but shallow.

Q: Is traditional craft compatible with modern manufacturing? A: Partially. Some mingei-influenced approaches have been successfully adapted to small-batch and artisanal production. But the deeper insight of mingei isn’t about production method — it’s about the relationship between maker, material, and user. That relationship can be honored in digital products without abandoning scale; it requires treating design decisions as commitments rather than experiments.

Q: Why does lacquer matter as a modern design reference? A: Urushi lacquer represents a technology refined over millennia to solve real problems — durability, food safety, beauty — using only natural materials, without any of the design overhead of modern materials science. It’s a useful provocation: what would our products look like if we optimized for longevity and care rather than for cost and production speed?