#149 "Fidgetability"
Design that just begs you to play with it 🎳
This week’s Design Lobster has got the fidgets. We’re looking at how and why to design interactions that compel people to play with them again and again. Plus we’re messing around with the Fidget Spinner, 2017’s breakout fidget hit 🤏
Question: What is “fidgetability” and why does it matter?
There is something inherently satisfying about some interactions, and in his magisterial July 2023 essay Design Engineer Rauno Freiberg documents the invisible details that contribute to some feeling just so damn good. One of my favourite sections introduces a concept that Rauno calls “fidgetability”.
Wonderful interactions don't have to be entirely practical. We've all been in math class, either biting our lips or repetitively clicking a pencil while crunching numbers. Behaviors like this are considered fidgeting—in other words, repetitive movements that help release situational stress or enhance concentration. Although there is no scientific research that supports this claim, fidgeting does feel like a part of intentional interaction design.
—Rauno Freiburg • Invisible Details of Interaction Design
Apple is especially good at nailing this quality in their physical products. I am constantly opening and closing my Airpods case in my pocket as I walk around just to feel the satisfying click and resistance of the magnets. But it’s also there in well-crafted software. I miss fidgeting with the stretchy water droplet in the iOS 6 Mail app circa 2012 and these days must get my fix instead stretching out and releasing the card stack in Apple’s Wallet app 😂
There’s just something reassuring about things which slot, click or snap together nicely. Like a kind of physical ASMR. Creating an opportunity for designers to imbue even small and insignificant moments with a surprisingly powerful emotional connection.
Design takeaway: How could you make your design more pleasurable to fidget with?
🤏 Fidget to your heart’s’ content with Lochi Axon’s illustrations on the Family.co homepage
Object: Fidget spinner
There is a whole category of objects whose physical properties practically compel us to touch and fondle them. I’m thinking worry stones, Baoding balls, stress balls, rosary beads, even certain types of paper fans. One of the more recent entrants to this category was the so-called Fidget Spinner. In 2017 these three-pronged spinning toys suddenly appeared whirring in the hands of children and adults across the world. Made out of plastic and metal, they have a central bearing that allows the three arms to spin around the centre at speeds of up to 10mph.
Marketed as a stress-reliever and focus-enhancer for those with ADHD (though without a great deal of solid evidence) demand for the toy spread virally in early 2017 following the efforts of two seventeen year olds in New York; Alan Maman and Cooper Weiss. To the chagrin of their teachers, for several months of that year they were running a clandestine 3D-printing operation from a factory in Brooklyn to pump out the spinners for classmates, marketing them heavily on social media.
Interestingly, a patent for a fidget spinner like device was initially created by an inventor Catherine Hettinger in the early 1990s. Hettinger was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a condition that causes muscle weakness, and she invented the spinner as a way to interact and play with her daughter without getting too tired. Hettinger design is simpler, with the spinner rotating on a fingertip rather than a bearing. She surrendered her patent in 2005, paving the way for a flood of spinner products in the following decade.
Design takeaway: What parts of your design most invite touch?
👍 In Design Lobster #55 we covered the “thumb pot”—a satisfyingly tactile piece of Tudor design
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Quote: “Take your pleasure seriously.”
– Charles Eames
We’ve covered the work and ideas of Charles and Ray Eames a few times over the years here at Design Lobster. Their approach to design was notably playful, from the puppets they used to the playing cards and other toys they created. Especially in po-faced business settings, talking about pleasure can feel kind of frivolous, but as this week’s examples show, we ignore it at our peril!
Wishing you a pleasurable week,
Ben 🦞
Elsewhere…
🔊 Andy Allen on designing with sound: “Listen to the world around you—the twang of a ruler across a radiator or the thrum of the subway train as it resonates through the tunnel at a specific pitch. Becoming a visual designer begins with learning how to see the world. Sound design begins with learning how to listen to it.”
💭 Matt Webb on the dreams of designers: “Whether we call it design fiction or pathfinding or the manifestation of design and belief, there’s this power - in small ways, sketching an app and enticing the product managers, or in major ways, shifting policy - to dream dreams in such a way that we are all compelled to bring those objects back from the other side of the bridge.”
🛋️ A lovely illustration of twenty iconic designer lamps—by Federico Babina
✏️ How design works at Figma—from Sho Kuwamoto
👘 My latest aesthetic obsession: Japanese Byobu screens depicting clothes racks
And lastly, a design remix…
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