As the evidence from generative AI in higher education starts to roll in, it is becoming clear that “frictionless” GenAI often undermines learning.
GenAI products designed to minimise the user’s effort to obtain a polished answer or document undermine intellectual work such as questioning assumptions, reframing problems, or revising claims. As this interaction paradigm establishes itself in higher education (surveys consistently report student usage at approximately 80%) the consequences of unscaffolded use of frictionless tools are becoming profoundly damaging to student learning. These consequences include weaker critical thinking, reduced metacognitive awareness, premature cognitive closure, avoidance of productive difficulty, and a shift from active participation in knowledge production to passive consumption of convergent outputs.
Baki Kocaballi (UTS Faculty of Engineering & IT) supervised a Masters interaction design project by Joseph Kizana to investigate ways of inserting interaction friction in the user interface of an ideation web app, with a preliminary evaluation by both students and professionals. This uncovered some really interesting reactions. They then teamed up with CIC’s Simon Buckingham Shum, and Sharon Stein (University of British Columbia) to explore this further, resulting in this new paper which will be presented next month at the Workshop on Tools for Thought, as part of the prestigious ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI26).
Here’s a sneak preview of the preprint:
Kocaballi, A. B., Kizana, J., Buckingham Shum, S., & Stein, S. (2026). Drag or Traction: Understanding How Designers Appropriate Friction in AI Ideation Outputs Workshop on Tools for Thought, ACM CHI Conf., Barcelona. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.27550
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