In 2011, I completed an MPhil thesis titled An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design (Bisset, 2011). It argued that design practitioners and researchers needed to more clearly articulate the role of design in motivating and engaging human behaviour. It synthesised theories from psychology, museum studies, and service design into what I called a "Motivational Design Framework". It documented an applied design process for a public engagement exhibition about ergonomics. It proposed methods for evaluating whether designed experiences actually motivated the people who encountered them.
Twelve years later, I'm returning to that work - to think through it again with the benefit of what's happened since, both in the field and in my own thinking. The thesis represents a version of myself that no longer exists but whose thinking remains present in my current work. Engaging with it is a form of intellectual archaeology: excavating assumptions, tracing influences, seeing what was latent that has since become explicit.
The original problem
The thesis opened with a claim that still feels right: that there is a need for design practitioners and design researchers to more clearly articulate and understand the role of design in motivating and engaging human behaviour. At the time, this felt urgent because design was expanding beyond its traditional territory of physical artefacts into services, experiences, and systems - domains where human motivation wasn't incidental but central. If you're designing a chair, motivation is someone else's problem. If you're designing a museum exhibition, a healthcare service, or a public engagement campaign, motivation is exactly your problem.
Yet the design literature of that moment had surprisingly little to say about motivation directly. There was extensive work on usability (whether people can do things), on persuasion (whether people will do things), on aesthetics (whether people like things). But motivation - the energisation and direction of behaviour, the question of why people bother in the first place - was treated as a black box. Something designers could influence but couldn't articulate. The thesis tried to crack open that box by drawing on psychological theories of motivation and mapping them onto the concerns of design practice.
The framework
The Motivational Design Framework that emerged was deliberately synthetic. It wasn't trying to create new theory but to connect existing theories from different domains in ways that might be useful for designers. The core structure mapped physical, interactive, and social dimensions of designed experience against psychological needs identified by self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985): competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Above these sat what I called the "truth" or "learning" layer - the ultimate purpose that engagement was meant to serve.
The synthesis also drew on museum studies, particularly the work of Black (2005) and Casey (2001), who had articulated how exhibitions can progress from merely presenting objects to enabling interpretation to fostering engagement with meaning. These layers of curatorial thinking - objects, interpretation, understanding, learning - seemed isomorphic with the psychological progression from physical affordance through interaction and social context to motivated action. Keller's (1987) ARCS model (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction), developed for instructional design, mapped naturally onto exhibition contexts and provided a practical vocabulary for evaluating whether motivational design was working.
What the framework was not trying to do was reduce motivation to a formula. The thesis explicitly positioned itself against deterministic models of user behaviour - what Dunne (1999) had critiqued as designing around "simple generalised models" that turn users into caricatures. The framework was meant to sensitise designers to motivational dynamics, not to prescribe mechanistic interventions.
The psychological sources
Self-determination theory provided the structural core. Deci and Ryan's (1985) three basic needs - autonomy, competence, and relatedness - offered a way to think about what people need from designed experiences in order to engage willingly rather than compliantly. The thesis mapped these needs onto design layers: autonomy corresponded to physical and sensory design that supports independent navigation; relatedness to social and interactive design that enables shared meaning-making; competence to systemic design that supports skill development and mastery. The insight that autonomy is foundational - you can't feel competent or connected if you can't act at all - shaped the framework's entire architecture. What I didn't sufficiently acknowledge was that SDT's evidence base was primarily laboratory experiments; as Gagné and Deci (2005) noted, most studies tested cognitive evaluation theory in controlled settings, and many real-world activities are not intrinsically interesting in the way lab tasks can be designed to be. The mapping onto design layers was more speculative than the thesis let on.
Discrepancy theory provided the motivational engine. The idea that motivation arises from a gap between where you are and where you want to be gave the thesis a concrete mechanism. The exhibition design deliberately created and calibrated discrepancy - sufficient gap between visitors' existing understanding of ergonomics and what the exhibition offered to create learning, not so much as to overwhelm. But discrepancy can also generate denial, rationalisation, and learned helplessness; and framing design as "managing discrepancy" positions the designer as the one who decides what gaps matter and how they should be resolved. This is the territory where motivational design shades into manipulation, and the thesis didn't fully reckon with that.
Keller's ARCS model provided the evaluative vocabulary. Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction gave the thesis practical categories for assessing whether the exhibition worked as motivational design. But ARCS was applied retrospectively - to evaluate an exhibition designed through other methods - rather than prospectively guiding design. This limited what the evaluation could show: it could assess whether the exhibition produced ARCS-relevant outcomes, but couldn't test whether ARCS-guided design would have produced better outcomes. Keller (2017) himself later expanded ARCS into a ten-step motivational design process with audience analysis built in from the start - exactly the prospective application the thesis never attempted.
Flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and play contributed the experiential dimension - the idea that engagement peaks when challenge and skill are balanced, when the activity is autotelic rather than instrumentally driven. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1986) added a developmental trajectory: from novice rule-following through competent pattern recognition to expert intuition. The thesis drew on Polanyi's (1966) distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge to argue that skilled behaviour is autonomous behaviour - acting from embodied competence rather than conscious deliberation - connecting skill development directly to autonomy as a basic psychological need.
The context
The thesis emerged at a specific moment. UK science policy was shifting from "public understanding of science" - a deficit model that assumed public ignorance needed correcting - to "public engagement with science" - a participatory model that positioned citizens as legitimate stakeholders in scientific and technological decisions. The 2000 House of Lords Science and Society report crystallised this shift, arguing that scientists needed to learn to listen as well as to talk.
This wasn't merely a change of terminology. The deficit model implied that the public's relationship with science was a problem to be solved through better communication. The engagement model implied that it was a relationship to be negotiated through dialogue. The thesis sat at this inflection point, though the shift itself was more contested than I presented it. Chilvers and Kearnes (2015) argue that the call for engagement was partial and inconsistent, and that engagement initiatives often reproduce the power asymmetries they claim to correct - constructed "publics" consulted on terms set by experts. The exhibition was a case in point: drawing on participatory aspirations while remaining substantially expert-led. My current PhD research on a national data platform confronts exactly these questions at vastly greater scale: "user-centred design" is claimed; genuine influence over platform architecture is absent. "Engagement" is performed; substantive participation in decisions that matter is foreclosed.
In parallel, design thinking was in the ascendant - the belief that design methods could be applied to any problem. Service design was exciting and marginal; I contributed a small case study to the first edition of This is Service Design Thinking (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010). The recognition that services involve multiple touchpoints over time, requiring designers to think about motivational trajectories rather than momentary states, was reshaping what motivational design could mean. By 2024, design thinking has been celebrated, institutionalised, and subjected to sustained critique. The optimistic claims have met organisational reality. The gap between what the models of that period implied - dynamic users, co-created value, empowered participants - and what institutional contexts actually permitted was already visible, though I didn't fully see it at the time.
What has changed since
I spent years in practice - as a service designer in healthcare, in public sector digital transformation, in data-intensive contexts. This experience changed how I read the MPhil. The theoretical framework met material resistance. The assumptions about what visibility produces, what participation enables, what design methods accomplish - all have been tested against institutional reality.
The field shifted too. Motivation was absorbed into behavioural design and contested. "Nudge" approaches, persuasive technology, and gamification did exactly what the thesis proposed - connecting design to motivational psychology - but often in ways that prioritised manipulation over engagement that actually served people. The critique of dark patterns, the backlash against gamification, the recognition that much digital design is optimised for addiction rather than flourishing - these developments cast the original project in a different light. The question isn't just "how can designers understand motivation?" but "what are designers doing with that understanding?"
The next post examines the empirical ground on which the framework was tested - the case study, the methods, what they revealed and what they couldn't see - and traces what happened when motivational psychology was captured by interests that had nothing to do with human flourishing.
References
Bisset, F.J. (2011). An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design [MPhil thesis]. Brunel University.
Black, G. (2005). The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. Routledge.
Casey, D. (2001). Museums as Agents for Social and Political Change. Curator, 44(3), 230-236.
Chilvers, J. and Kearnes, M. (Eds.) (2015). Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics. Routledge.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum Press.
Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E. (1986). Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. Free Press.
Dunne, A. (1999). Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. MIT Press.
Gagné, M. and Deci, E.L. (2005). Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(4), 331-362.
House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology (2000). Science and Society. HMSO.
Keller, J.M. (1987). Development and Use of the ARCS Model of Instructional Design. Journal of Instructional Development, 10(3), 2-10.
Keller, J.M. (2017). Motivational Design for Learning and Performance: The ARCS Model Approach. Springer.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Routledge.
Stickdorn, M. and Schneider, J. (Eds.) (2010). This is Service Design Thinking. BIS Publishers.