Hi, I’m Michael, and I’m an independent and interdisciplinary researcher of behavioural design. I study the psychological consequences of systems that are misaligned with how people really think, learn, and behave.
I study the design of our surroundings: things like physical spaces, digital interfaces, and reward systems, and how they influence our behaviour.
I look at where friction arises in real-world and digital environments, and I assess where it can be reduced or increased to better support helpful behaviours or prevent harmful ones.
Ultimately, I try to understand how systems can be designed to better reflect the true limits of human mental processes.
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RESEARCH THREADS
These are some of the threads I’m interested in exploring and plan to research in depth.
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UX as a diagnostic lens to infer organisational values, constraints, incentives, culture, and competence distribution.
- The withdrawal of responsibility in digital services, the externalisation of risk, and how design choices quietly communicate contempt for users.
What does the design of a product or service, and your experience as a user, tell you about the inner workings of a company?
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How engagement‑optimised content feeds, social media systems, and dark patterns shape user attention, behaviour, and wellbeing.
- Exploring friction-based interventions (browser-level ‘unhook’ tools) and bringing intentional usage to social media.
Examining everyday phenomena such as the intention to watch one video on a video streaming website, and manipulation by the algorithm into unintended, extended usage.
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The consequences of service systems and everyday infrastructure that fail to provide redundancy, give users slack, or allow for normal human limitations.
- Digital systems that assume all humans have a smartphone, data, battery life, a network connection, technical literacy, and never make mistakes.
What happens when you enter a public car park and the only method of payment is substandard or non-functional?
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Unstructured, exploratory play as a vital human practice, despite the lack of visible external reward structures.
- The importance of curiosity, practice and exploration of instruments (musical or otherwise) for its own sake, without ties to performance, mastery, or identity.
- The delegitimisation of exploratory play that leads to long-term disengagement or shame-based avoidance of entire domains.
The consequences of treating a creative instrument as ‘something you must get good at’, and the benefits of instead treating it like a toy that you can explore.
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Real-time metacognitive state-tracking for optimising learning and working efficiency in an unstructured environment.
- Identifying cognitive fluctuations during independent work and integrating deliberate rest and recovery to improve learning persistence, effectively switch learning modes, and prevent distraction or premature task abandonment.
The importance of learning how to learn and study efficiently, including keeping track of how ‘full’ or tired your brain is so that you can switch study methods instead of getting distracted or stopping too early.
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How official ecosystems create psychological legitimacy for digital objects, and how objects outside those ecosystems feel ontologically incomplete.
- How and why emulated video game experiences feel real despite the unofficial hardware, while emulated data feels ‘fake’ when it sits outside the official ecosystem.
Why do emulated Pokémon feel ‘fake’?
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Experiential vs analytical evaluation of products and items across domains.
- Evaluation through experience and feel vs technical specifications and statistics: when specs or scores can’t capture what actually matters, and hands‑on use tells you more in seconds than data does in hours.
When a mobile phone’s impressive technical specifications on paper don’t tell you about the frustrating software issues that arise as a result of daily use.
A loot-based role-playing game invites you to drown in gun stats and cumulatively spend hours comparing raw numbers, when you could just try the gun out for yourself.
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The cost of radical self-sufficiency driven by compulsive low-leverage skill acquisition.
- The psychological consequences of learning everything simply because it feels safer than trusting others, spending money, or accepting dependence.
Investing time and energy into learning skills you have no interest in, out of distrust or refusal to accept dependency, or not wanting to spend money.
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The cognitive, organisational, and external impact of technological paradigm shifts in creative industries.
- How transitions such as 2D to 3D or Unity to Unreal reshape workflows, decision-making heuristics, design languages, and organisational structures.
- How studios adapt (or fail to adapt) when new tools disrupt established production rhythms, mental models, tacit knowledge, and shared practices.
What happens in a game development studio when the development team has to ditch their primary production software and learn something new?
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The systemic misalignment between human learning psychology and the engagement‑driven design of modern digital learning environments.
- How users mistake activity for progress, and how platforms often encourage that confusion.
- The emotional fallout when a person’s identity as a ‘learner’ collides with the reality that they haven’t actually gained the competence they believed they were earning.
How does a language learner feel after using only a single language learning app for 1000 days but is still unable to hold a conversation or string a sentence together?
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How do cooperative video game systems alter a player’s threat appraisal, and what design patterns preserve or dissolve fear when allies are present?
- How fear emerges from the interaction between social presence, environmental hostility, and mechanical vulnerability, and why some games’ horror is socially fragile while others’ is structurally resilient.
Why do some games lose their horror elements when you have allies to help and protect you, other games keep their horror regardless of ally count, and yet other games gain horror elements when allies are removed?
A conversation about horror affordances in video games.
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How modern multiplayer games delegitimise unstructured, persistent, identity-safe play spaces, not by removing them, but by hiding them, deprioritising them, and refusing to treat them as first-class modes.
How this delegitimisation reshapes learning, identity formation, sense of community, and the emotional ecology of play.
- Exploring the set of emotional states that a multiplayer environment enables, supports, or suppresses through its structural design.
A core difference between Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch is that in the past, TF2 centred and legitimised the server browser as the default mode of play, while Overwatch has centred and legitimised matchmaking as the default since the beginning. This produces radically different learning, identity, and community outcomes.
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WORKING TITLES