Name: Hongyi Zhu
PhD Title: Designing Gamified Entrepreneurial Support: A Service Design Tool for Prisoners
PhD Abstract
My PhD research explores how gamification can be integrated with Service Design and examines the practice potential of this combination within highly constrained carceral environments.
The research is grounded in a practical challenge: while employment is widely recognised as a key protective factor against reoffending, many prisoners struggle to engage with existing employment or entrepreneurship support meaningfully. This is often due to disrupted educational trajectories, neurodiversity, repeated experiences of failure, and systemic exclusion. Conventional interventions tend to assume stable attention, low emotional risk, and high learner confidence, assumptions that rarely hold within prison contexts.
This research approaches Service Design as a situated and system-aware practice framework, used to understand the complex relationships between institutional constraints, multiple stakeholders, and learning support within custodial settings. Within this framework, gamification is conceptualised as a mediating mechanism for participation and engagement, rather than as a system of incentives or rewards. Through low-risk and “learning-by-doing” design approaches, the research investigates whether gamification can extend the practical reach of Service Design, enabling participation, co-creation, and learning to take place under restrictive conditions.
The research adopts a practice-led and participatory methodology, involving co-creation workshops, design experiments, and prototype development within UK prison contexts. The research focuses on how Service Design operates, adapts, and develops when gamification is introduced as part of its practice logic. In doing so, the project aims to generate design-based insights into entrepreneurial learning and support within high-constraint environments.
Short Bio
Hongyi Zhu is a PhD researcher in Service Design whose work focuses on gamification, entrepreneurial learning, and rehabilitation in the criminal justice context. She has a background in game design and service design, and her research combines practice-led design, participatory methods, and ethnographic approaches. Alongside her academic work, she has been involved in practical design activities within UK prisons, contributing to co-creation workshops and creative learning initiatives that support prisoners’ engagement and skill development. Her broader interests lie in designing accessible ways for marginalised groups to participate in learning, decision-making, and future planning.
Supervisory team:
Prof Lorraine Gamman, Prof Silvia Grimaldi
Dates:
2023 – 2029 (expected)
Links:
Service Futures Lab 