I used to think design was supposed to make things easier.
That was before I stumbled into a gallery in Rotterdam—2019, I think, maybe early 2020—where every door handle seemed engineered to confuse me, where light switches required a minor philosophical debate before I could figure out which direction meant “on.” The exhibit was called something pretentious, I forget exactly what, but the pamphlet used the term “adversarial design” about seventeen times. At first I was annoyed. Then I realized I’d been standing in front of a deliberately obtuse thermostat for six minutes, genuinely questioning whether I understood temperature. Which was, apparently, the entire point. Adversarial design doesn’t coddle you. It doesn’t whisper reassuring instructions or hold your hand through the interaction. Instead, it throws up obstacles—intentional friction, purposeful confusion—to make you reconsider what you think you know. It’s design that argues with you, that refuses to let your assumptions slide by unexamined. And honestly, once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere.
When Making Things Difficult Becomes the Whole Damn Point
Here’s the thing: most design philosophy operates on a principle of invisibility. Good design, the saying goes, is design you don’t notice. Don Norman wrote about this extensively—doors that afford pushing should look pushable, interfaces should match mental models, reduce cognitive load wherever possible. That’s fine for, I don’t know, airport signage or medical devices. But adversarial design flips that script entirely.
Carl DiSalvo, who literally wrote the book on this (well, one of them), describes adversarial design as a practice that “agonistically engages political issues.” Which is academic-speak for: it picks fights on purpose. It creates uncomfortable experiences that force you to confront contradictions, power structures, assumptions you didn’t even know you were making. The Pixelache Festival in Helsinki—wait, maybe it was in Tallinn?—featured a project called “Unfit Bits,” a fitness tracker deliberately designed to reward sedentary behavior. Every time you sat still, it celebrated. The goal wasn’t to make you lazy; it was to make you question the entire culture of optimization, productivity, the tyranny of the step counter.
I guess it makes sense when you think about it. Sometimes discomfort is the point.
The roots go back further than you’d think—to critical design, speculative design, design fiction, all these movements from the late ’90s and early 2000s where designers at places like the Royal College of Art started asking: what if design didn’t solve problems but instead highlighted them? Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby created objects that were intentionally impractical, like a chair that gave you mild electric shocks or a radio powered by blood. Disturbing, yeah, but also impossible to ignore. Their work wasn’t meant for manufacturing or mass production. It was meant to make you think differently about the objects around you, about what technology assumes, about what “progress” even means.
Adversarial design takes that provocation and weaponizes it—in the best possible way.
The Philosophy of Productive Frustration and Why It Actually Works
Turns out, cognitive science backs this up, at least partially. There’s research—I think from the early 2010s, give or take—showing that moderate difficulty during learning actually improves retention. It’s called “desirable difficulty,” a term coined by Robert Bjork at UCLA. When things are too easy, your brain doesn’t encode them properly. You need some friction, some struggle, to actually internalize information. Adversarial design exploits this principle but pushes it into ethical and political territory. It’s not just about learning facts; it’s about unlearning assumptions.
Take the “Shredder” project by the Glowlab collective. It was a public shredder installed in New York City where you could destroy your personal documents—credit card statements, medical records, whatever. Except the shredded pieces were displayed publicly in a transparent container below. You thought you were protecting your privacy, but you were actually putting it on display, just in fragmented form. The design forced you to confront the illusion of privacy in the digital age, the false comfort of “secure disposal.” It was adversarial because it didn’t just tell you privacy is complicated—it made you feel that complication in your gut.
I’ve seen similar tactics in interfaces that deliberately slow you down before you do something irreversible. Like that moment when you try to delete your account and the site makes you type out “I want to delete my account” instead of just clicking a button. Annoying? Definately. But also kind of brilliant, because it introduces a pause, a moment of reflection, a speed bump for your impulse.
Where Antagonism Meets Ethics and Things Get Messy Real Quick
But here’s where it gets tricky.
Adversarial design walks a razor-thin line between productive provocation and outright hostility. Who decides what assumptions deserve challenging? Who gets to frustrate users in the name of enlightenment? There’s a real risk of paternalism here—designers who think they know better than you, who believe their political framework is the correct one to impose through deliberately bad experiences. I used to think this was purely theoretical until I encountered a bathroom at a conference (I won’t name which one, but it was in Berlin) where the gendered signage was so abstracted, so “thought-provoking,” that people with accessibility needs genuinely couldn’t figure out which door to use. The designers probably thought they were challenging gender binaries. What they actually did was create barriers for people who needed clarity, not confusion.
The ethical calculus matters enormously. DiSalvo talks about “agonistic pluralism,” borrowing from political theorist Chantal Mouffe—the idea that democracy requires ongoing contestation, that conflict isn’t something to eliminate but to channel productively. Adversarial design, at its best, creates that kind of generative conflict. At its worst, it’s just designers being smug.
There’s also the question of consent. When you enter a gallery, you expect to be challenged. When you’re just trying to adjust the thermostat in your office, maybe not so much. Context matters. Intent matters. The line between “making you think” and “making your life harder for no reason” is sometimes vanishingly thin, and I’m not convinced anyone has figured out where exactly it sits.
Anyway, I keep thinking about that Rotterdam gallery, about those six minutes I spent arguing with a thermostat. I was frustrated, sure, but also genuinely engaged in a way I rarely am with everyday objects. Maybe that’s the real measure—not whether the design is pleasant, but whether it makes you stop and actually think instead of just sliding through on autopilot. Whether it earns its difficulty or just inflicts it. I don’t have a clean answer. But I guess that’s kind of the point.
