I am a Swedish entrepreneur and design researcher with a PhD in service design from the Royal College of Art in London and a MSc in business administration and finance from the Stockholm School of Economics. I work in the interdisciplinary nexus of business and design.

I have the following research interests:

Design for Behaviour Change 
Everything that is designed influences people’s behaviours and attitudes. We spend more time in artificial, man-made environments, including fastmoving digital environments or cyber-physical environments mediated by technology. The influence of new technology, especially new computer hardware and software on how we live and work is profound and unprecedented. At RCA, I regularly teach the basics of how design influences people’s behaviours and attitudes.

Ethics and Governance of Persuasive Systems
Persuasive Systems are information systems designed with the intent to influence people’s behaviours and attitudes. We spend more and more time consuming digital media, why a larger share of the human experience today is mediated by pervasive digital platforms. My research focuses on new methods for understanding how to design  persuasive systems, in the light of rapidly accelerating technological development.

Human-like technology
Human-like simulations in digital media have reached new levels of fidelity and realism. This poses unique challenges for designers, who are tasked to design relationships with artificial human-like technologies such as chatbots, voice assistants and virtual influencers.

Design Cybernetics
Design cybernetics is a transdisciplinary research field positioned in the nexus of design and cybernetics. My research explores new practical applications of cybernetics in service design. Cybernetics concerns goal-oriented systems and the ‘art of steering’. It is considered an epistemology and it offers a holistic philosophy of how goal-oriented systems work and numerous concepts useful for design.

Publications

A cybernetic service design approach for taming persuasive service systems: reflective case studies for design practice PhD thesis, Royal College of Art. Link to PDF

Borgefalk, G. & de Leon, N. (2019). The Ethics of Persuasive Technologies in Pervasive Industry Platforms: The Need for a Robust Management and Governance Framework. 10.1007/978-3-030-17287-9_13.

Borgefalk. G. (2018) Designing relationships with technologies which pass for human. Touchpoint: the Journal of Service Design. Volume 10, no. 2. October 2018. Link