Chasing Engaging Ingredients in Design
Sebastian Deterding, Imperial College London
Thursday 3rd April 2025. 14:00-15:00 GMT. Online.
How can we motivate ourselves and others? That is a perennial question, also for designers and engineers building systems that support us in our pursuits, from playing games to working out, working well, or reducing carbon emissions. Like Mary Poppins looking for the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, many research communities have tried to identify the “active ingredients” designers can add to systems to make them engaging, variously calling them nudges, behaviour change techniques, motivational affordances, or game design elements. In this horizon talk, I will retrace my own journey as a researcher and designer chasing engaging ingredients in design. I will reflect on the current state of the art; what has hindered progress (including the research-practice gap, replication crisis, and theory crisis); and why games and computational models are the perfect combination to generate practical insight into what moves us.
Speaker Bio
Sebastian Deterding is a translational design researcher working on tools and methods to make psychology actionable for designers – and advance psychology with design-based insight. He is most well-known for his field-defining work in gamification. He holds a Chair in Design Engineering at the Dyson School at Imperial College London, is founding editor-in-chief of the journal ACM Games: Research and Practice, co-editor of The Gameful World (MIT Press, 2015) and The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies (Routledge, 2024), and has helped create engaging experiences touching millions of users for organisations including ABB, Amazon, BBC, BMW, Greenpeace, KLM, Novartis, Supercell, and many others.