GYUHO Lee © 2026
One second, before you can't undo it
DWELL
Timeline
Jun 2026
TEAM
Individual
MY ROLE
Concept & Direction
Interaction Design
System & Test Strategy
AI Pairing
Before an AI sends, buys, or commits for you, one second of resistance. I built it twice. One you feel on a screen, one that runs as real, tested firmware.
THE TENSION
"We stopped deciding."
AI made every choice easy to skip, so we skip it. It drafts the email, fills the form, picks the plan, and we wave it through. The screen keeps getting smoother while our judgment gets less practice, right where it still matters most. By now it touches almost everything: what we buy, when we sleep, who we trust.
concept ꞏ FRICTION AS FEATURE
"What if resistance was the point?"
Most design spends its energy removing friction. Fewer steps, fewer clicks, nothing left between you and done. DWELL goes the other way, on purpose.
a deliberate pause, exactly where the choice matters
It places a small, deliberate resistance exactly where a real choice should happen. Not a wall that stops you, but a pause you can feel: long enough to think, short enough to trust you with the rest.
I chose its cool blue on purpose, so the moment reads as calm rather than alarm. The idea has roots in HCI research on deliberate friction and automation overtrust. Handled with care, friction gives judgment its moment back.
scene ꞏ THE APPROVAL GATE
One click. 340 people
Picture the moment. An AI agent is ready to email 340 people for you. Twelve of them sit outside the company, three are executives, and none of it can be pulled back. The send button waits for a command, whether yours or the AI’s.
DWELL appears in the moment before action, while the choice is still yours.
the contrast
Three ways to meet
the moment.
Same decision, three responses. I built all three so the difference is something you feel, not something you take on my word.
No friction tap
One tap, already gone. The default we all know.
Screen friction
A dialog asks if you're sure, and most people click straight past it. A safeguard that rarely does its job.
Tangible friction
You have to stay with it. Hold, and the moment comes back to you.
Resistance you can sense is resistance you can't autopilot through.
THE HELD MOMENT
Hold, and it's yours again.
The hold reads you.
Tap fast and commit on reflex, and the device asks for a longer hold; slow down, and it relaxes. The more impulsively you act, the more it pushes back, in proportion.
The friction tunes to the person in front of it, not to a fixed rule, and that is the research question made tangible.
The form was a decision, not decoration. A sent message spreads and can't be gathered back, so committing should feel like releasing a tide, not pressing a button.
trust
The same idea, in two bodies.
On a screen, DWELL is something you feel. As a running system, it's something you can check. The decision logic stands on its own, apart from any screen or chip, it runs on a laptop and on a virtual Arduino board, and passes twenty unit tests you can run yourself. So when I say the friction adapts to your impulsivity, that isn't a rendered animation; it's a system you can rerun.
Every attempt becomes one row of data: timestamp, required hold, actual hold, impulsivity, outcome.
Behavior turns into something legible.
So I handed it to five people. Same task, same stake. And the wait stretched from 2 to nearly 5 seconds, shaped by nothing but how each of them behaved.
WHAT THEY SAID
P3 · THE PAUSE CAUGHT A REAL MISTAKE
"While I waited, I re-checked the recipients and the text, and found something I actually had to fix."
the imposed dwell surfaced an error the user would have sent
P5 · AN HONEST LIMIT (IT DROVE A DESIGN CHANGE)
"I couldn’t feel the exact commit point. It just felt like ‘held long enough.’ A state/timing cue would help."
→ the case for the filling-ring progress feedback
One honest note on scope:
this is an engineering and design demonstration, made in pairing with an AI coding assistant.
I owned the system design, the decision logic, and what the tests had to prove.
reach ꞏ BEYOND ONE INBOX
The email is just the stage.
The inbox is only the example. The real subject is any moment where one reflexive tap is irreversible and reaches further than it feels: wiring a payment, deleting an account, approving a bulk action, confirming a clinical order, signing something legal. Wherever an agent acts for you, a held second is cheap insurance.
I kept DWELL a generic commit control, not an email widget, so the same friction transfers without a redesign.
THE MAKING
Made, not found.
The fluid is the mechanism, not decoration. Friction only returns judgment if you feel the weight before you commit, so the motion had to do two things: hold the press, then spread on release. Each material was judged by that, not by taste. Flat 2D water was too flat to raise any alarm. Chrome and frosted silicone read as opaque and closed, and neither could show a decision bursting and spreading outward.
2D → chrome → silicone → tearing → blob → ring
A free-floating blob looked right but could not hold both the press and the spread at once. The ring did both: it fills as you hold and opens outward as you let go.
the honest limit
This is a design probe, not a finished claim.
limit #1: A probe, not a trial.
Five people, real logs. Enough to show the friction adapts to the person and can change a decision. Not enough to prove it holds at scale, or over time.
limit #2: A heuristic, not a measurement.
It reads recent hold history, not a person's actual state. A working proxy, not a calibrated one.
limit #3: The open question.
Enough friction, repeated, can become its own reflex. The wait meant to interrupt autopilot could slowly become autopilot. Whether deliberate friction keeps calibrating trust or decays into habit is the next thing to test.
REFLECTION
What it is, and where it goes.
DWELL is a working argument: friction can be designed, tuned to a person, and felt in two materials at once.
Turning it into a study is
straightforward to scope:
Run the three conditions and measure whether tangible friction lowers reflexive confirmations. Abort rate against required dwell, time to decide, self-reported certainty.
The next step takes it out of the simulator and into your hand.
The firmware is already waiting for the board.
Until then, the second is yours.
"NEXT ARCHIVE"
Fixie AI
DIRUNI
