The previous post laid out what the thesis was and what it drew on. This post examines two things: what happened when the framework met reality - the case study, its methods, and its blind spots - and what happened when motivational psychology was captured by interests that had nothing to do with human flourishing.
The case study
Ergonomics Real Design was a public engagement exhibition hosted at the Design Museum in London from late 2009 to early 2010. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the project aimed to engage visitors with ergonomics as a discipline - to move beyond the narrow association with office chairs toward an understanding of the field's broader scope. The collaboration brought together Brunel University, the Design Museum, and the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. Each partner brought different expertise, different institutional interests, and different assumptions about what "engagement" meant and how to achieve it.
I joined the project as a researcher-practitioner with a dual role: contributing to the exhibition's design and researching the design process itself. This positioning - inside the project while studying it - shaped both the thesis's methodology and its limitations. Reflection can illuminate tacit knowledge, but it can also construct post-hoc narratives that smooth over the messiness of actual practice.
The contextual research confirmed a significant discrepancy between public and expert understanding (Young et al., 2010). The interviews with visitors resulted in 154 occurrences of the words ergonomics, comfort, chair and back in the semi-structured interview data, constituting 11.52% of the full text. The expert ergonomists never mentioned any of those words; their language was focused on the processes of ergonomics rather than tangible or experiential objects. Tag cloud analysis visualised this difference starkly: public perceptions clustered around chairs, comfort, and household objects; expert definitions emphasised human, systems, design, and processes.
The evaluation data suggested mixed success. Design students showed relatively flat ARCS profiles across exhibition sections - their ratings for attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction didn't vary dramatically. Expert ergonomists showed more differentiated responses, with some sections rated significantly higher than others. The qualitative feedback was particularly revealing: experts appreciated exhibits that showed the process of ergonomics - how ergonomists think and work - more than exhibits that simply displayed ergonomic products. The implication was clear: designers attempting to engage people through public engagement with science should not focus on end results of the ergonomic process, or what artefacts are ergonomic; they should focus on the process by which an ergonomist addresses the task of making them ergonomic.
What the case study couldn't see
Twelve years on, several blind spots become visible. Many design decisions were made for pragmatic rather than theoretical reasons. Exhibits were included because partners could source them, excluded because they couldn't. The spatial layout was constrained by the venue's architecture. Timeline pressures meant some ideas were never fully developed. The thesis (Bisset, 2011) acknowledged that decision-making at some points privileged maintaining consistency with the project team's own definition of ergonomics, rather than taking an approach that deliberately created discrepancy with the user definition. But it didn't fully reckon with what this meant: if the exhibition design was shaped as much by availability, institutional politics, and deadline pressure as by motivational theory, what does the evaluation actually test?
Despite the thesis's commitment to participatory ideals, the exhibition was expert-led. The project team decided what ergonomics meant, which contexts to include, how to structure the visitor journey. Visitors were consulted - their perceptions informed the design - but they didn't co-create the exhibition. They remained research subjects, not design partners. The thesis was honest about this tension: ergonomics is an expert-led design discipline, and encouraging people to participate in understanding an applied scientific discipline may be antithetical to the foundations of the discipline itself. But it didn't resolve the tension. The motivational design framework advocated for intrinsic motivation and autonomous engagement, yet the exhibition remained an expert intervention designed to move visitors toward predetermined understandings. Arnstein's (1969) ladder of citizen participation would place this firmly in the consultation zone - information flows upward, but power stays with the project team.
The ARCS-based evaluation captured self-reported perceptions at a single moment - immediately after visiting. It couldn't assess whether engagement persisted, whether visitors' understanding actually changed, or whether any of this translated into behaviour beyond the museum. The sample sizes were small (5 expert ergonomists, 20 design students), the samples were convenience-based, and neither group represented the general public the exhibition ostensibly targeted. The methods couldn't support the theoretical ambitions. The thesis acknowledged limitations but sometimes proceeded as if conclusions were stronger than the evidence supported.
And the thesis barely examined the institutional machinery that made the exhibition possible and shaped its form. EPSRC funding came with reporting requirements that influenced what counted as "engagement". The Design Museum had its own curatorial approach that constrained how content could be presented. The Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors had reputational interests in how their discipline was portrayed. These institutional forces weren't background context; they were constitutive of what the exhibition could be.
The corruption
While I was working on the thesis, the wider field was discovering how profitably motivational psychology could be turned against people.
Gamification arrived first. The thesis had emphasised autonomy over control, intrinsic over extrinsic, co-creation over imposition, competence development over point accumulation. Gamification abandoned all of this. It captured play's surface features - points, badges, leaderboards - while stripping out the autonomy, mastery, and meaning that make games worth playing. Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999) had already demonstrated through meta-analysis that tangible rewards reliably undermined intrinsic motivation for interesting activities. The gamification industry had access to this research. It chose to ignore it, because points and badges are trivially easy to implement, immediately measurable, and satisfying to the stakeholders who commission them. The question of whether they actually motivate anyone is secondary to the question of whether they generate metrics that look like motivation.
The attention economy was the deeper corruption. If gamification misapplied motivational psychology through carelessness, the attention economy weaponised it with precision. Users are not the customer; users are the product. When business models reward attention extraction over user benefit, the same psychological knowledge that could serve users becomes the instrument of their exploitation. Variable reward schedules - the slot machine mechanic that Fogg's (2003) persuasive technology framework helped systematise - drive compulsive engagement by exploiting the dopamine response to unpredictable rewards. Pull-to-refresh, infinite scroll, notification badges calibrated to create anxiety - these aren't bugs. They're the business model working as designed.
The thesis assumed good faith - that designers would use psychological knowledge to serve users. The business models of the attention economy ensure otherwise. The same understanding of discrepancy that could help a museum exhibition calibrate learning now helps a social media platform calibrate addiction. The same autonomy-supportive design principles that could empower users are systematically inverted to create dependency. The thesis couldn't have anticipated the scale of this capture, but it should have anticipated the possibility. The ethical dimension was always implicit in motivational design; the attention economy made it explicit by demonstrating what happens when that dimension is absent.
The psychological mechanisms are the same either way. Design that offers real alternatives, transparent operation, and easy exit serves users. Design that manufactures engagement while undermining the capacity to disengage serves the platform. The difference is whose interests the mechanism is pointed at.
The gap between framework and practice
There is a further problem the case study exposed that the theoretical ambitions obscured. The framework provided orientation and vocabulary but left implementation to designer judgement. The gap between "consider these factors" and "do these things" remained largely unbridged. The thesis itself acknowledged that translating the framework into actual design practices would require the development of a design methodology. That methodology was never developed. The framework described; it didn't prescribe.
Design tools succeed when they integrate with practice - when they offer prompts at appropriate moments, support reflection and iteration, and produce outputs that feed into existing workflows. The Motivational Design Framework stood apart from practice. It was a map to consult, not a process to follow. Twelve years of working as a service designer in healthcare and public sector digital transformation has made this gap feel wider, not narrower. My PhD research on a national data platform confronts similar challenges at vastly greater scale and stakes: theoretical frameworks are useful but never sufficient; they help organise thinking but can't replace close attention to what's actually happening. "Motivational design" is easier to theorise than to practice, and the gap between aspiration and achievement is itself a research finding.
References
Arnstein, S.R. (1969). A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216-224.
Bisset, F.J. (2011). An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design [MPhil thesis]. Brunel University.
Deci, E.L., Koestner, R. and Ryan, R.M. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668.
Fogg, B.J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann.
Young, M.S., Bisset, F.J., Grant, L., Williams, B., Sell, R. and Haslam, R. (2010). An Ergonomically Designed Ergonomics Exhibition: Lessons from and for Public Engagement. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 11(4), 1-17.