Making things that move us

Join us for Professor Sebastian Deterding’s Imperial Inaugural online or in person.

There is no need to register to attend so please be sure to use the add to calendar button.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 14 May!

Abstract

From global warming to healthy ageing, from civic life to work and learning, we face the question of motivation: how do we move ourselves and others to act? This has spawned a wide range of design and research fields concerned with shaping our environments to shape our behaviour, hopefully for the better. And across these fields, one recurring intuition has been that games, purpose-built for enjoyment and engagement, could offer inspiration. So what can we see when we view design for motivation through a gaming lens?
Professor Sebastian Deterding leads the Motivational Design Lab at Imperial College London, which explores how we can use computational media to better understand human motivation, and make this knowledge actionable for design. In this inaugural lecture, he will reflect on how making things that move us moved him from the humanities to behavioural sciences, design, and computing. Along the way, he will show how a game perspective can widen and sharpen our view of motivation, behaviour, and academic life.

Biography

Sebastian Deterding is Professor and Chair of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, Dyson School of Design Engineering. He is the 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 leads the Centre of Excellence for Games at the UK Smart Data Donation Service. He obtained an MA in Comparative Literature at the Westphalian Wilhems University Münster and a PhD in Communication Research at the University of Hamburg, both in Germany. Prior to joining Imperial in 2022, he was Professor of Digital Creativity at the University of York, and Assistant Professor in Game Design at Northeastern University and Rochester Institute of Technology. His design agency coding conduct has supported clients including the BBC, BMW, Greenpeace, KLM, Novartis, and numerous startups.

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