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Friction: I intentionally ask for help in areas where it might be weird to ask for help. I've parked my newborn in the hands of strangers at church (I wouldn't have given her to any strangers but I knew these people were regulars at daily Mass), asked the neighbor I didn't know very well if I could borrow a wheelbarrow, welcomed dinner guests by giving them a knife and asking them to chop an onion. My rule is I only ask for things I would be willing to do, and I ask expecting that the person will say yes (not couching it in "I'm so so so sorry to bother you but..."). Because I think those are things that we really do owe each other but there's often a barrier to asking and therefore a barrier to providing. But if I've asked, then the other person feels more comfortable asking me for a similar favor, and that's how I work to build an economy where we're helping each other more and more aware of each other's needs.

I exempt myself from a lot of work when I'm pregnant. I sit and let other people wash the dishes, that sort of thing. For one, this reminds me that the pregnancy itself is meaningful work that I'm doing. It also sets an example for others (pregnant women and those who surround them) that pregnant women should not be expected to run at non-pregnant speeds - to normalize sitting while pregnant, I guess I would say, so pregnant women don't feel that they need to apologize for being tired and sore, and so others realize that they ought to be respectful of how tired and sore pregnant women are (which means expecting that they will sit).

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Sep 19, 2022·edited Sep 19, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

> When have you used a tool that seemed designed for the benefit of someone other than you, the ostensible end-user?

Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but I think nursing covers can function in this way. It seems to me that they often function more to mitigate others’ discomfort with nursing rather than the mother’s. And of course they don’t always do the baby any favors.

> Are there places where you’ve deliberately added friction to your routine, in order to be more attentive to actions that would otherwise be mindless?

I love the “friction” framing of this. For me, I’m grateful that my current circumstances allow me to practice more attentiveness to our food system and textile industry by cooking, growing, and making some things by hand. Also, I don’t commute anymore, but I feel like I was able to be more attentive to my neighborhood when I rode the bus than when I drove.

Edit because I thought of another thing. When I restrategized and scaled back dramatically on social media use several years ago, I did it with the goal of working harder at the relationships that mattered most to me, rather than being content with the illusion of connection. Not saying I practice this super well today, but it’s an intention I’ve had.

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Sep 19, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

For the first question, I keep coming back to planned obsolescence. So many tools are not designed for users at all, but for the profit they'll create. And when a tool is being designed for profit (and

within a culture of continuous consumption) you get all sorts of haywire outcomes that are antithetical to helping people live good/better lives. I'm thinking of the phone that is made to die (and not be fixed), fast fashion that destroys the environment, plastic products built to break - all of which also hurt/kill so many workers along the way.

I have quite a few places where I've added friction - from having my kiddo make dinner with me to gardening. But in a contrary vein to planned obsolescence I'd say reducing consumption through the local buy nothing group, aiming to repair rather than buy something new, and my 4th quarter project - drastically cutting down our plastic consumption.

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Not so much a tool, but a lot of societal norms surrounding motherhood. Hide your pregnancy during first trimester and don't admit that you're miserable and need extra time to rest, because you need to be productive and nobody wants to accommodate a pregnancy esp if they can't see it. Buy "nursing clothes" instead of fashion that is already nursing-friendly (loose shirts work even if they aren't designed specifically for nursing, but tight/fitted clothes do not), also shame on you for a nip slip if it's nursing-related. And the absolute lack of places that are friendly to both kids and adults. If I take my toddler to a place that is adult-centered, like a bank or waiting room, I'm constantly saying "don't touch, don't touch, don't touch." If I take her to a place that is kid-friendly, like a playground, the only people that ever go there are kids and the adults that brought them. There is no place that is actually welcoming to a vareity of ages.

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Sep 19, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

In user experience design we often do things to crest friction. Some designers use this for good others use it for ill.

There are ways to design for that optimize for readability and filling them out quickly. There are times when you want people to slow to consider a form carefully before they complete it. Think of a form designed for a frictionless sale, to one where you’re approving sensitive health data to be shared. A conscientious design would create friction before letting someone sign away their rights.

In dark ux patterns you may delay a user from reaching a highly desired goal. This is often used to create a sense hard progression by creating tension. It’s often used in background checking experiences. The system isn’t working as hard as it appears. The goal is to create tension and an appearance of deep work. The person employing the service is expected to be anxious enough that they won’t think twice before accepting an upsell offer. The offer itself is often under terms that are disadvantageous to the customer. East to pay, hard to unsubscribe.

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Sep 20, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

On positioning for gynecological interactions: Today I had a better than average experience.

I sadly had a recent miscarriage. The OB's in-office ultrasounds detected no heartbeat at 6.5 or 7.5 weeks, when it would normally be visible, and all of my physical symptoms concurred. But due to Texas' heartbeat law, the OB said she wouldn't be able to proceed to any interventions like D&C or medication if they became warranted, until I first got a more advanced ultrasound at a specialty imaging center ($200 after insurance). This was to provide a higher certainty that there was no heartbeat. I assume it was also to distribute liability about it to a second opinion. The potential refusal of care considerably increased my stress and fear.

Anyway, the imaging center was lovely. For positioning, there was no bare butt catching the AC breeze at the farthest edge of the table. No feet awkwardly perched in stirrups like the pedals of a too-small bicycle. This place had a full-length table with the back inclined. Once I reclined, the tech asked me to bend my knees and place my feet on the table. Then she asked me to raise the end of the paper blanket near my waist, reach my hand down between my legs, and see and take hold of the transvaginal ultrasound wand to insert it myself. Perfect! With self-insertion, there was no need to contort myself to afford the tech an up close and personal view.

It might not be as easy for some other procedures, but it would be nice for it to be the standard for at least transvaginal ultrasounds, which are quite common during pregnancy and for other internal imaging.

I also recommend out-of-hospital midwifery care for those with straightforward pregnancies and births. Compared to OB and hospital care, I've found midwives to be night and day in terms of how humane, accommodating, body-celebrating, and mother-celebrating they are - no stirrups is just the tip of the iceberg. Switching to a birth center with midwives at 31 weeks with my first baby was one of the the best decisions I ever made.

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Sep 22, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant

I've attempted to add friction to a number of things that traverse the working mom world. For my third baby i did take him to work, though i admit it didn't work well at all. Im not sure office work, or anything requiring long periods of focus, work with a baby. I made the decision on my own to hire a nanny and go home to breast feed. I did say no to pumps and love your analysis of them leah. Ultimately i decided to be present to work fully, but fir less hours,and this is made possible by being 4 blocks from work.

Perhaps the technology that has me questioning who wins right now is cell phones... Im doing a semester at a high school and watching kids on them makes me realize how awful and addictive they are. They protest loudly at restrictions but the over communication of their lives means no one, actually, can get their attention. How did a communication tool make us unable to communicate?

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Re tools, I often feel this way about the design of childcare in my area & proposals to expand the school day. Full day (and full day only) preK and a longer school day are framed in part as a way to enable parents to work longer - and a lot of the benefit of that is captured by business owners & shareholders. Publicly traded daycare companies (eg Bright Horizons) also work to distribute whatever marginal profit they can get to shareholders rather than back to the workers and/or the children. Having mainly full time care options for young children requires both parents to commit to a full time work schedule (or pay for care they don’t use), even if they might prefer to work part time when their children are very small.

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Sep 19, 2022·edited Sep 19, 2022

"When have you used a tool that seemed designed for the benefit of someone other than you, the ostensible end-user?"

Our healthcare-provider-and-payment system is full of tools which promise to put patients in control of their own health, but which typically don't deliver. Given all the compliance requirements, I don't think it's possible to put patients, rather than compliance, first. I think we're stuck with a system putting compliance first, but I'm still amazed how low a priority actually serving the patient is.

Electronic appointment scheduling, communication, and charting is supposed to reduce friction, but surprisingly, often doesn't. I appreciate the control electronic record-keeping has given me in scrubbing past misdiagnoses from my chart, to avoid distracting providers and being one of those dreaded "thick-folder" patients. But my pared-down chart, which everyone in the hospital group is supposed to see identically... still goes unseen?...

Telehealth appointments work great when they work. But often, they don't. There are understandably security, privacy, and facial-recognition concerns involved, but having 12 minutes of a 15-minute telehealth visit wasted on technical difficulties throwing the visit into noncompliance (risking loss of payment coverage and prescription eligibility) blows, especially when you logged in early to run the suggested configuration check to avoid exactly that.

My closest sibling worked on UX (User eXperience) for a big regional health plan (not Kaiser Permanente -- Kaiser Permanente seems to be one of the better ones), wanted to stick with the job because it's an important one, but eventually quit: working a UX job where the user's experience so often came last was just that frustrating.

Patent exploitation on medical devices is also a problem. Inhalers for asthmatics keep being slightly redesigned just to renew the patent. There are now some generics available, but perhaps thanks to pharmacy benefit managers' rebates, often the generics end up more expensive, not less, on a patient's plan. No doctor likes the yearly merry-go-round of switching patients' inhalers just because the inhalers preferred under their plan keep changing and are unaffordable otherwise. For a while, I thought I'd stick with generic inhalers, now that generics are finally available, on principle. But principle costs several hundred bucks a month!

https://endpts.com/pricy-inhalers-remain-expensive-due-to-device-tweaks-that-keep-competitors-at-bay-researchers-find/

https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/new-evidence-shows-prescription-drug-rebates-play-a-role-in-increasing-list-prices/

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How about a Breast Feeding Women's March, with babies nursing en route? I keep hearing about the birth dearth; if our society wants babies, they will have to take motherhood on OUR terms.

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I work at an organization that provides a cozy and comfortable private 'wellness room' for pumping mothers to use, and even then, pumping itself has always been something I've had an aversion to in an almost guttural way (including developing moderate anxiety about pumping enough for my baby when I had to go into the office). Those degrees of separation between my months-old baby and I in a moment like breastfeeding that is so intimate and bonding and that I worked so hard to make work in the beginning, trying to 'hurry up and pump' so I wouldn't be late to the next 'urgent meeting'... ...maybe that's what it is. Trying to pump in an office or work environment is all about trying to hide the most urgent and important work that a mother could be doing in favor of what an organization considers 'urgent and important' ... After having my first child, all work priorities and all potential work priorities just pale in comparison to that little soul that is crying out for you. I'm so thankful to have the flexibility now to work from home with more flexible hours, but those first times pumping in an office just felt like, what am I doing here? It felt so jarring trying to let-down alone in an office, and I kept thinking this is not worth whatever 'urgent priorities' my office job has set out for me. Nothing is as compelling as those small moments with my baby or those priorities I've grown into as a mother that have become the greatest and most fulfilling gift.

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Friction: I live in an RV in a small town in Baja California Mexico, which means I am much more selective about what I purchase or accept from my MIL who likes to give us her old stuff.

Also, a chopping knife over all the fancy gadgets. In fact, I’d say that many kitchen tools marketed these days fall into tools not designed for the user and lacking friction. Keep it simple and don’t be afraid of more work.

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Oh, I have so many thoughts about tools; I'm aggressively left-handed. Scissors can be the bane of my existence, especially if they're just a bit out of alignment and will subsequently refuse to cut even if I torque it Like That Just So Maybe? (no). (I own one pair of very nice left-handed sewing shears, but no others.) And while lefties are by far a smaller percentage of the population than women (about 10% versus, you know, 50%), we're still a large group of people using tools designed for the right-handed majority.

In terms of creating "friction" in a routine -- I haven't added any myself deliberately, but I have made it a personal goal to not apologise for my 10.5-month-old daughter's noises. It's a little startling for others to hear a very excited baby squeal (especially, say, at church), and I feel the stares, but she's not going to learn to participate in society (or the liturgy) if she's constantly shushed. ...That being said, *accomplishing* the not-apologising is astonishingly hard, and my success rate isn't as high as I'd like it to be.

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A tool I’ve used: Facebook. Designed to benefit the creators and advertisers, not the users.

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The friction comment brings to mind one example for us: we pay tithe at church with a checkbook. This helps us to make sure that we don’t accidentally bounce any checks, but my husband repeatedly wanted to set up autopay. I find the act of writing the check reminds us of what we are doing, and it gives an opportunity for our children to see each week that we give to God financially (even though they don’t know what the numbers mean on the checks). I know many churches would prefer an automatic giver, but I aim to be a cheerful, faithful one. Even though that may mean we miss weeks when we are traveling or sick.

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Friction? It has such a negative connotation in my mind, when I prefer to live a life of peaceful calm.

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