What If Heavy Files Felt Heavy?

Summary

I've been experimenting with Force Touch (Apple's pressure-sensitive trackpad) and built a small interactive sketch to explore an idea: what if the effort required to interact with a digital object reflected some physical property?The demo has four types of draggable elements, each with different pressure behaviors.The Heavy Block requires 0.7 pressure to pick up and to maintain. Drop below the threshold while dragging and you lose your grip. It's genuinely tiring to move.The Light Bubble has a 0.01 threshold. Practically any touch moves it. It floats and sways when released.The Sticky Note needs 0.6 pressure to unstick, then only 0.1 to keep moving. The initial resistance mirrors peeling something off a surface.The Adhesive Pad is easy to grab at 0.2, but requires 0.6 pressure to release. Without enough force, it stays stuck to your cursor. You have to commit effort to put it down.The shadows respond to physics too. Heavy objects cast tight, dark shadows because they can't be lifted high. Light objects cast diffuse, spread shadows because they float far from the surface. There's also a paper-rustling sound that plays while you're building pressure but haven't yet reached the threshold. It plays longer for heavy objects and is nearly instant for light ones.It's a toy, but playing with it got me thinking about something larger.In the physical world, weight communicates something important. It tells us that this thing requires effort, has consequences, and shouldn't be moved carelessly. We've internalized this so deeply that we adjust our grip, our posture, and our attention based on anticipated weight before we even lift something.Digital interfaces have largely ignored this. Dragging a 4GB video file feels identical to dragging a 4KB text file. Deleting your entire photo library requires the same click as deleting a typo. Moving a computationally expensive ML model feels the same as moving a static image.Imagine if file weight corresponded to actual file size. That ...