FRICTION

We have spent decades chasing seamlessness. Smoother tools, faster outputs, more efficient pipelines. And somewhere in that pursuit, something got lost, the happy accident, the unexpected encounter, the mark that could only have been made by this particular hand at this particular moment.

BOUNCE 2027 invites designers, creatives, educators to ask a harder question: what if friction isn't the problem? What if it's the point?
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Friction is resistance. It's what happens when you stay in difficulty long enough for something new to emerge, something that is yours.

As “intelligence” becomes cheaper/faster, presence becomes rarer. As tools get faster, the slow thing gets more valuable. As the frictionless life becomes the default, the designers who choose otherwise are making a different kind of argument, about what making is for, and what it does to the person doing it.

BOUNCE 2027 is a call to mid-career designers who have earned their shortcuts and are choosing, deliberately, not to take them.
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Friction As Method: Process, Resistance & the Slow Work

What are you willing to do the long way?

Craft doesn’t separate process from result, because the process is the result. The twists and turns, the mistakes and tangents become the work. How are designers resisting the pressure to optimise? What constraints, limitations, and slow practices are producing better work, and better makers?

Potential themes that could be explored:

• Analogue process and hand-based making in contemporary practice
• Designing with constraint, limitations as creative catalysts
• Craft, mastery, and the ethics of taking your time
• Personal projects as laboratories for resistance

Friction as Signal: What Difficulty Teaches

What are you learning from the thing that isn't working?

We've built systems optimised to remove discomfort, from our tools, our workflows, our interactions and our life. But discomfort is information, interruption is information. The constraint that frustrates you is also the constraint that reveals you. The friction between what you intended and what emerged is often where the most interesting work lives, and is impossible to prompt into existence.

Potential themes that could be explored:

• Failure, iteration, and what the rough draft contains
• Designing for and from vulnerability and uncertainty
• Cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, or cross-context practice as productive disorientation
• Critical and speculative design that resists easy resolution

Friction as Presence: Trust & Self

What does it mean to make something that could only come from you?

As non-human intelligence floods the zone with outputs, presence becomes the rarest currency. The unmistakable trace of a particular mind, body, and life moving through a particular medium. 
This strand is about authorship in the deepest sense, not ownership, but origin. Work that carries the maker and is full of serendipity.

Potential themes that could be explored:

• Voice, signature, and the development of a distinctive practice (not distinctive style)
• Independent creative economies and communities
• Human presence in the age of generative tools
• The relationship between lived experience, place, and visual language

Note: This is not an argument against clarity, or accessibility, or care for the people who use what we make. Removing friction from a form, a wayfinding system, or a public service is often an act of equity, and that work matters. But there is a difference between friction that excludes and friction that demands. BOUNCE 2027 is interested in the second kind: the difficulty that asks something of the maker, and gives something back.

Open call for workshop facilitators is also open. Apply here.
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