Collective User Experience and Autonomy

User Experience (UX) design is usually guided by principles of seamlessness and ease of use, aiming to reduce friction in the use of digital platforms. These principles, however, can foster risks for users’ personal autonomies by overdetermining their possible courses of action. How to navigate this problem is difficult; while different voices have advocated for the ethical benefits of friction, articulating it at the individual level often results in frustration for users. In this paper, we argue that friction becomes particularly empowering when it is embedded in digital infrastructures that put the focus on collective technopolitical autonomy. To exemplify this, we explore MetaDecidim, the participatory platform governing the Decidim project. The Decidim project aims to offer a platform for deliberative democracy that can be appropriated in different contexts and that is, more importantly, governed by the very community through an instance of the platform (the MetaDecidim instance). MetaDecidim usually prioritizes collective experience over individual usability, which leads to the inherent frictions of deliberative participation. But unlike in commercial digital infrastructures, where friction usually alienates users, MetaDecidim channels friction into a structured process of appropriation, putting the platform itself as an object of deliberation and allowing users to intervene on it through the collective action that it enables.