The stone that blocks nothing

On designing repellence for humanity

Note by Hiroshi Sato

In a Japanese garden, you sometimes find a small stone — hardly larger than a fist — resting on a stepping stone in the middle of the path. A length of dark rope is tied around it in a cross. The stone blocks nothing. A child could step over it. Anyone could nudge it aside with a shoe. But for someone who has absorbed the aesthetic grammar of that garden, the stone seems to say, quietly but clearly: not this way.

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This is a tome-ishi, sometimes called sekimori-ishi — a boundary-keeper stone. It has served this role in the paths of tea gardens for centuries. What makes it worth pausing over is what it does not rely on. It does not make passage impossible. It does not cite a rule. It does not threaten a consequence. It works because the people walking that path share a sensibility — a norm — in which a small stone, tied with rope, means stop.

At the entrance of a small library I run on Ishigaki Island, in the far south of Japan, there is a refrigerator. A sign invites visitors to take a cold drink — free — and, if they like, to leave one for the next person. No camera watches the bottles. No ledger tracks who takes and who gives. The system works, most days, because the people who find their way into this particular room tend to be the kind of people for whom leaving something behind feels natural.

What the stone and the refrigerator have in common is that they lean on the norms of the people present. Not on a transaction. Not on a posted rule. Not on a barrier that makes the undesired action physically impossible.

I do not think this is a pleasant coincidence. The ability to lean on norms — on shared aesthetic sensibility, if you prefer — may be the condition that makes a place good. When a space can trust the norms of the people in it, it can offer things that rules and barriers cannot produce. The tome-ishi produces a graceful pause — a sense of being understood — because it never needed to raise its voice. A “DO NOT ENTER” sign achieves the same regulatory outcome. But it produces nothing of the kind.

What we feel in such moments — that quiet pleasure, that sense that something is working — is, I think, this: the goodness and humanity of the people present is being gently drawn out. And for that to happen, the space has to resist the urge to over-specify. Not to codify. Not to incentivize. Not to wall off. It trusts the people inside to rediscover the meaning for themselves, and to try to act accordingly.

How, then, do we design places that can afford to be this human — this iki, as the Japanese might say?

What norms need in order to be leaned on

Lawrence Lessig, in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, identifies four forces that regulate behavior: law, social norms, the market, and architecture. Law prohibits. The market prices. Architecture — what Lessig calls “code” in digital contexts — makes certain actions physically possible or impossible. And norms are what people in a given community simply do or do not do, without being compelled. Behavior, Lessig argues, is shaped by the interplay of all four.

Image by Hiroshi Sato

In the design practice I know, attention has concentrated on two of these. Architecture — reducing friction, smoothing paths, making the desired action the easiest one. And the market — aligning incentives, pricing access. These are, broadly, the tools of attraction: pull people in, remove obstacles, bring resistance toward zero.

Law and norms, meanwhile, tend to be treated as givens — conditions a designer expects to find already in place, not something a designer shapes. Among those pushing against this assumption is the Japanese lawyer Tasuku Mizuno, whose book Legal Design argues for actively designing law to shape better societies. It was through Mizuno’s writing that I first encountered Lessig’s framework. The book was exciting, but what stayed with me longest was not its main subject — law — but the modality Lessig names norms.

We may not be able to produce norms directly, or reshape them at will. But we can, I think, design the conditions under which norms become reliable enough to lean on.

The condition, as far as I can tell, is this: the people present need to share the relevant norms. And for that to be the case, something has already filtered who is in the room. Some people are not there — not because they were turned away at the door, but because something about the space gently signaled that this was not their kind of place.

I am calling that signal repellence — affordance’s counterpart. Where affordance is what a space quietly invites, repellence is the quiet pressure that steers away.

The design literature already has neighbouring terms for what might sit opposite affordance — anti-affordance, disaffordance, among others. Perhaps what I am describing is simply an affordance that says away. Affordance is a deceptively familiar concept that is, in truth, difficult and many-sided; its counterpart naturally takes different forms depending on which face of affordance you are looking at. What I want to name with repellence is the counterpart at the level of being in a space — not the complementary absence of an invitation, but a positive quality: the way a space gently makes itself not-for-you if its norms are not yours.

Image by Hiroshi Sato

What repellence is and is not

Repellence is not hostility. A person who walks past a Japanese garden whose customs feel mysterious and demanding, past a shop with a large bookshelf where souvenirs ought to be, past a library in a residential back street they would never visit on holiday — none of these people is harmed. None is insulted. They simply sense that this place is oriented toward something other than what they came looking for, and they move on. No one loses face. Repellence does its work in silence.

The tome-ishi I began with works this way too. The stone leans on norms — but those norms are sustained by the garden’s own repellence: its spatial formality, its customs, the very effort of learning to read it. The garden’s repellence ensures that the stone will be understood by the people who reach it.

Repellence, as I mean it, is a quality of a space that gently steers away — or, more precisely, allows itself to be ignored by — people for whom the norms of that space would not come naturally. It draws on the things in the space, the atmosphere, sometimes the surrounding environment, to raise the likelihood that the people who do step inside share the norms the space depends on.

To design repellence is not to draw a barrier on a plan. It means making choices — about location, about what stands at the entrance, about the kind of attention a space asks for — that, together, let a quiet pressure form. The three places I have run taught me this not through theory but by showing me what happens when that pressure is absent, faint, or strong.

Three locations

All three are set in the Yaeyama Islands, at the far southwestern edge of Japan.

The first

The first was on Taketomi Island — a small island near Ishigaki whose economy runs almost entirely on tourism. I opened a small T-shirt shop in the center of the island, and that is where my career as a sole proprietor began.

At the level of location, repellence was zero. The island’s tourism infrastructure — its curated walking routes, its presence in guidebooks and on travel sites — was pure attraction, drawing visitors in by the hundreds each day. At the level of the shop itself, I filled it with attraction too: T-shirts facing the street, signs communicating casual prices.

The business worked. People came in, bought shirts, left. Of every hundred visitors, perhaps one became someone I exchanged messages with afterward — a relationship, not just a transaction. The other ninety-nine were commerce, completed and gone. It was the time I spent with that one in a hundred that made me begin to question all the attraction I had aimed at everyone else. Was this not the real reward of running a small shop — the chance to connect, human to human, on the far side of a sale? Was there a way to find those people, instead of waiting for them to find me?

I decided to place a small bookshelf in the T-shirt shop. Anyone who reacted to a bookshelf in a beach-town souvenir store — who noticed the titles, who lingered — was probably someone I could connect with. A small signal, pitched at a specific kind of person.

It seemed like a fine idea. The following week, the pandemic arrived, and the shop closed with the bookshelf still in it.

The second

The second location was in the commercial district of Ishigaki City. Ishigaki, like Taketomi, is an island full of attraction for tourists. But this time I chose a street two or three blocks off the main tourist strip — the edge of the high-attraction zone. Plenty of tourists still walked by, but the proportion of the loudest, most hurried ones dropped slightly.

Through the pandemic I had grown more interested in people’s behavior and community than in graphic products, more in what a place gives to a street than in what a transaction extracts. I decided to open this space not only as a T-shirt shop but as a private library — to open it to the neighborhood.

And the question I thought about most, when opening it, was: how do I help people walk past?

I wanted to keep out the kind of tourist who arrives in groups, drinks in the street, and shops impulsively. Partly because, I admit, the years on Taketomi had worn me out. Everyone has moments when they want to let loose — but those moments do not need to happen in my small library. A few streets over, there are excellent shops built to welcome exactly that energy.

But the more important reason: that kind of presence would itself become a repellence — steering away the very people I did want to meet. People drawn to these islands not as a place to consume but as a source of learning. People testing new ideas rooted in the life of this place.

So I placed a large bookshelf — filled with books on perception, craft, and the histories of these islands — directly facing the street, in the spot where a tourist would first look in from outside. In my own experience as a traveler, a shelf of somewhat difficult books is a jarring sight when you are out with friends looking for fun. The small signal I had tried on Taketomi — the bookshelf — might function here, in the commercial district, as a large piece of repellence.

Photo by my friend

It did. My T-shirt shop and library became, despite its address, a quiet basecamp for slow travelers, a perch for fathers waiting out their family’s shopping, a small laboratory for ideas. T-shirt revenue fell by roughly half. But the proportion of visitors who became warm, human conversations rose to something like eight in ten. The slow time with those people, the relationships that followed, the design commissions that began arriving through them — these more than filled the gap.

The third

The third location — where the library sits now — is a quiet residential neighborhood, a twenty-minute walk from the commercial streets. Most tourists never reach it. The people who come are neighbors passing by, people who know it is here, or travelers curious enough to wander residential back streets and breathe in the rhythm of daily life. The walk itself is the repellence.

Inside this larger, quieter repellence, I found I could try almost anything I wanted to make this place feel good.

The clearest example is a bench. I love public seating — for a while I made a hobby of seeking out benches, or better yet, unintentional objects that afford sitting, and reading on them wherever I went. But at the second location, I could not place a bench outside. With insufficient repellence, a bench would have become a free party spot for passing tourists. The empty cans and coffee cups left regularly in the sidewalk planters were testimony enough. Too many different norms coexisted in that space for any of them to be leaned on.

A twenty-minute walk generates repellence that the shop itself does not need to provide. The bench built from the building’s existing step. The pay-forward refrigerator. A book-lending system based entirely on trust. These gentle systems would not have survived on a tourist path. They survive here because the location has already filtered who arrives. The people who come share enough norms — enough aesthetic sensibility — to keep these things running.

Image by Hiroshi Sato

Much of the time, in design, the question we face is about attraction: how do we get more people to notice, commit, stay? But when what we are after is not fast, instant reception but the slow, human comfort of a place — the kind where people’s goodness is quietly drawn out — it may be repellence, not attraction, that does the essential work.

A, B, C, D

I am aware that what I have described may sound like an argument for exclusion. The distinction matters, so I want to take the objection seriously.

Diversity, as I understand it, is best secured not by making every private space maximally inclusive — not by producing places A, A′, A″, and A‴ that each try to welcome everyone and leave everyone slightly uncomfortable — but by ensuring that a society contains places A, B, C, and D. Each shaped by its own norms. Each welcoming to the people for whom those norms feel like home.

Image by Hiroshi Sato

Norms and customs do not say you are unwelcome everywhere. They say this place exists to sustain something delicate, and the people here share an understanding that keeps it alive. If this shop is not for you, other shops exist. Other islands exist. Genuine diversity is produced by an ecology of distinct places — not by flattening each one into a version of all the others.

And there is a second wheel that turns alongside repellence. A place shaped by its norms still needs a way to welcome people who do not yet share those norms but wish to — people who sense something in that place’s rhythm, its aesthetic, its way of holding space, and want to absorb it, even though it has not become second nature yet.

I am myself such a person. I moved to this island nine years ago. The norms that hold here — the pace, the forms of courtesy, the space neighbors keep for one another — are very different from those of the place where I grew up, and I am still learning to read them. I am fortunate that traditional community events survive here, and that I have been given a place within them — a place where I can slowly work toward becoming someone who fits the norms and aesthetic of this island.

Now that I have found my own place inside a working repellence, I find myself drawn to two questions.

The first: what kinds of places can appropriately lean on repellence? What I have described is the use of repellence in a private space — a place I run with my own capital and my own responsibility. The same reasoning does not transfer straightforwardly to common spaces or public ones.

The second: how do we design the path that welcomes people into a space shaped by repellence? That path, I think, is what keeps repellence healthy — and what allows the most human experiments in comfort to take root and bloom on top of it.

References & further reading

For readers who want to follow the threads in this essay further.

On the four forces that regulate behavior

Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999; revised as Code: Version 2.0, 2006) — Lessig identifies law, norms, market, and architecture as four modalities that regulate human behavior. This essay borrows his framework, but focuses on the modality he names “norms” — the one designers tend to discuss least.

On designing law

Tasuku Mizuno (水野祐), Legal Design (『法のデザイン』, Filmart-sha, 2017) — Mizuno argues for actively shaping law to produce better societies. It was through this book that I first encountered Lessig’s framework. What stayed with me, however, was not law but the question of norms.

On affordance and its neighbours

Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 1988; revised 2013) — Norman brought Gibson’s concept of affordance into design practice. His anti-affordance names the bare absence of an invitation. Dan Lockton’s disaffordance, developed from Lessig’s architectures of control, adds intention. The repellence proposed in this essay sits beside both but works at a different register: not absence, not control, but legibility pitched toward certain people.

On opening a place to the street

Hiroshi Sato, Opening your place to the street (UX Collective, 2026) — An earlier essay in this series, on how a designer’s private library became a channel into the upstream conversation. The present essay picks up where that one left off: not how to open, but what must be in place before opening works.

On the engawa

Hiroshi Sato, What sits on the engawa (UX Collective, 2026) — On designing for wishes people cannot yet wish alone. The engawa, in that essay, is the zone where the other can remain other while moving closer — a concept that connects to the “second wheel” this essay describes.