Dr. Visch, V.T.

Valentijn Visch is associate professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.

Academic Background

My background is rather multidisciplinary running from arts (MA in Literature, MA in arts (post graduate Jan van Eyck academy, PhD in Cultural Sciences on animated movements and emotions) through psychology (cognitive- and emotion- (Postdoc at Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences and Cognitive Psychology EUR) to persuasive game design. Central in all my interests was the ‘experience of other worlds’ (e.g. aesthetic-, flow-, fiction-, game-world): what they are, what they do, and what causes them. When starting to work at the IDE faculty, I initially wanted to change the user’s experience by applying embodied cognition knowledge I obtained during my postdoc. However, I found out that most people didn’t want to be changed by design. Therefore, I turned my attention towards design for people who wanted to be changed – such as patients in mental healthcare. In these application domains, design could function as a facilitator for the user to reach his goal. Moreover, game elements proved to be very powerful motivators to be used in the design. This was the starting point of the persuasive game design (PGD) research line I established. The term Persuasive Game Design (PGD) is coined in our paper (Visch, Vegt, Anderiesen, vanderKooij, 2013) and aims, by the application of game elements in the design, to change the user’s real-world experience towards a more game-world experience. Accordingly, the game world experience is used to facilitate an intended behavioural change of the user in the real world, the socalled transfer effect.

At the IDE I’m coordinator of the Persuasive Game Design research, chair of IDE eHealth research lab, coordinator of the Bachelor Research and Design course, and project leader of two large research projects about persuasive game design: the FES CRISP G-Motiv project and the NWO CLICKNL NextLevel project.

Specialisation / field of research

  • Persuasive Game Design
  • Mental Healthcare
  • Motivation
  • Behavioral change

Lectures and/or coaches students on:

  • Research & Design: coordinator
  • PUUE: Persuasive game design
  • Cognitive ergonomics: Motivation
  • IPD: Motivation
  • Several graduation projects mainly on persuasive game design and research for mental healthcare and related topics.

Involved in the research project(s):