People find other uses than the mere instrumental in artefacts. Driven by expressive and communicative needs and desires we often resort to various sources of friction or challenges through which we can prove our selves to other people and ourselves. We have clothes that are hard to obtain or difficult wear. Furthermore, in our strive to form a cohesive sense of self, we pick mirror-objects; things that resonate well with an evasive idea of who we are.

When we set out to design personal technologies we must see to these frictional and reflexive uses as well as the merely instrumental. We should think of the people we design for as protagonists, not users, whose identities are shaped through performance and narrative, where (digital) objects can serve as props, or catalysts of stories rather than tools.