The first post laid out what the thesis was - its framework, its psychological sources, the moment it emerged from. The second examined what happened when the framework met reality: the case study and its blind spots, the corruption of motivational psychology by gamification and the attention economy, the gap between framework and practice. This final post asks what remains. What did the thesis get right? What did it get wrong? And what would I do differently now?
What the thesis got right
The fundamental claim - that understanding motivation helps designers create better experiences - still holds. Discrepancy, need satisfaction, challenge-skill balance, skill development: these aren't invented constructs but features of human psychology that design can support or undermine. The mistake isn't engaging with motivational psychology. It's doing so naively, without attending to context, power, and the potential for misuse.
The thesis identified autonomy as foundational, and this holds up better than almost anything else in it. Autonomy - choice, self-direction, the ability to act according to one's own values - is what separates supportive from manipulative design. Design that enhances autonomy serves users. Design that undermines it exploits them, regardless of how engaging the experience feels in the moment. The thesis (Bisset, 2011) put this plainly: the conscious design intent to develop user autonomy might be the single biggest thing designers can do to support intrinsic motivation. I'd still stand behind that sentence.
The integrative impulse was also right, even if the execution was uneven. Motivation isn't explained by any single theory. Self-determination theory provides the structural core; discrepancy theory provides the engine; flow and skill development provide the experiential dimension; ARCS provides evaluative vocabulary. No single framework captures all of this. The thesis's attempt to hold them together - mapping intrinsic and extrinsic factors across physical, cognitive, and social dimensions - gave designers a way to consider multiple motivational dynamics simultaneously. The specific synthesis needs revision, but the conviction that integration matters more than theoretical purity remains sound. It's worth noting, though, that Ford (1992) had already attempted a more rigorous integration - Motivational Systems Theory, grounded in a Living Systems Framework that provided the unifying architecture my thesis lacked. I didn't engage with Ford's work, which suggests the synthesis was more ad hoc than it needed to be.
The thesis also got something right about co-creation, even if it couldn't fully practise what it preached. The insight that motivation can't be designed into users but must emerge from their engagement with design - that value is co-created rather than delivered - anticipated later developments in participatory design and service-dominant logic. The exhibition didn't achieve co-creation, as the previous post acknowledged. But the orientation was right: design that respects users as participants in creating meaning is doing something different from design that treats them as targets for influence.
What the thesis got wrong
The thesis assumed good faith. It assumed that designers who understood motivation would naturally use that understanding to serve users. This was naive. The attention economy demonstrates that designers routinely work within structures that reward exploitation. Business models, metrics, and incentive structures can make manipulative design not just possible but rational. Individual ethics are insufficient when structural conditions reward manipulation.
It underplayed power. The framework focused on psychological mechanisms - what people need, how engagement works, what makes experiences compelling - while treating power relations as background context rather than constitutive forces. Who decides what counts as appropriate motivation? Who defines the discrepancies worth addressing? Whose expertise determines what competence means? The thesis engaged briefly with the tension between expert-led and participatory approaches but didn't adequately address how power shapes what motivational design can achieve and whose interests it actually serves.
It overestimated the utility of having a framework at all. The thesis sometimes wrote as if articulating the relevant factors was equivalent to providing actionable guidance. It's not. The framework offered orientation and vocabulary but left implementation to designer judgement. The gap between "consider these factors" and "do these things" remained unbridged. The thesis itself acknowledged that translating the framework into actual design practices would require a design methodology. That methodology was never developed. The framework described; it didn't prescribe. Twelve years of practice have made this gap feel wider, not narrower.
And the empirical methods couldn't support the theoretical ambitions. Self-report questionnaires, small convenience samples, no comparison conditions - the evaluation showed that something happened but couldn't demonstrate that motivational design worked better than alternatives or that any effects lasted beyond the museum visit. The thesis acknowledged limitations but sometimes proceeded as if its conclusions were stronger than the evidence warranted.
The ethical distinction
If there's one thing the retrospective has clarified, it's that the ethical dimension can't be bolted on after the fact. The thesis treated ethics as implicit - present in the aspiration to serve users, but never articulated as criteria. The corruption of motivational psychology by gamification and the attention economy made this absence costly.
The same understanding of discrepancy that helps a museum exhibition calibrate learning helps a social media platform calibrate addiction. The same autonomy-supportive principles that could empower users get inverted to create dependency. The psychology doesn't care who benefits; the ethics have to.
Self-determination theory's three basic needs - autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci and Ryan, 1985) - turn out to be useful not just as motivational concepts but as ethical assessment criteria. A design that enhances choice and self-direction is doing something different from one that constrains it; a design that develops real capability is doing something different from one that manufactures feelings of progress. The third need, relatedness, may be the most abused - social features that exploit connection and comparison to drive compulsive checking are the opposite of what SDT describes as need satisfaction. These questions don't resolve every case, but they put the burden of proof in the right place.
The test I'd propose now is reflective satisfaction: would users, fully informed about how a design influences them and thinking carefully rather than impulsively, want that influence? If the design only works because users don't understand what's happening, it's manipulation. If it would survive the light of transparency, it might be support worth having.
What a revised framework would need
If I were reconstructing the Motivational Design Framework today, the psychological knowledge would remain but the framing around it would change substantially.
Ethics would come first, not last. Before asking how to motivate users, the framework would ask whether this particular motivation serves their interests, what the business model rewards, and whether what's good for users and what's good for the organisation actually align. The intrinsic-extrinsic distinction provides a starting point - design that supports intrinsic motivation differs from design that manufactures extrinsic compliance - but it needs elaboration into practical assessment criteria rather than remaining a theoretical observation.
The framework would attend to structure as much as psychology. Individual designers can refuse to implement dark patterns, but structural forces - competition, investment models, industry-standard engagement metrics - create persistent pressure toward exploitation. A framework that addresses only individual psychology without acknowledging the institutional and economic conditions in which design operates is incomplete. My current PhD research on a national data platform confronts exactly this: the gap between what user-centred design aspires to and what institutional structures actually permit is not a failure of method but a structural condition.
It would be more selective theoretically. The original framework tried to synthesise everything - five psychological theories, museum studies, service design, instructional design. A revised version would prioritise concepts with demonstrated practical utility over comprehensive theoretical coverage. Self-determination theory's three basic needs might be sufficient as a core, with discrepancy and flow available as extensions when context warrants. Less theory, better applied.
And it would be processual rather than static. The original framework was a diagram - a map to consult before or after designing, but not a process to follow during it. Design tools succeed when they integrate with practice, offering prompts at appropriate moments, supporting reflection and iteration, producing outputs that feed into existing workflows. The Motivational Design Framework stood apart from practice. A revised version would need to be embedded in it.
The value of retrospection
The exercise has been humbling. Claims I made confidently now seem qualified. Methods I thought adequate now seem limited. Assumptions I didn't examine now seem problematic. But this is what retrospection offers - not validation of past work but learning from it.
The thesis was written at a specific moment in design's evolution. Service design was exciting and marginal. Gamification was emerging. The attention economy hadn't yet matured. Design thinking was in the ascendant and hadn't yet been subjected to sustained institutional critique. Returning to the thesis reveals both what was insightful for that moment and what subsequent developments have exposed.
What I'd emphasise now that I didn't emphasise then: ethics first, because understanding motivation is a form of power and power requires constraint. Structure matters, because individual designers operate within systems and changing practice without changing structures produces limited results. Users know things, because the framework positioned designers as those who understand motivation and users as those who experience it, when in fact users have their own motivational expertise that co-creation should draw on. And humility about knowledge, because the framework claimed more than it could demonstrate, and contemporary practice should hold claims provisionally and revise them based on evidence.
The thesis's legacy, if it has one, isn't the framework diagram or the case study findings. It's the questions it raised about how design and motivation relate - questions that remain relevant even as the specific answers need revision. Motivational design, reclaimed from its capture by exploitative interests, remains a worthy aspiration. Design that supports human flourishing - that helps people develop real competence, exercise autonomy, and connect with others on their own terms - is possible. Achieving it requires not just psychological understanding but ethical commitment, structural awareness, and the practical wisdom that comes from attending closely to what's actually happening rather than what your framework says should be happening.
References
Bisset, F.J. (2011). An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design [MPhil thesis]. Brunel University.
Deci, E.L. and Ryan, R.M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum Press.
Ford, M.E. (1992). Motivating Humans: Goals, Emotions, and Personal Agency Beliefs. Sage.