The Design Psychology Model: Application of Psychological Science to Research-Driven Ideation and Innovation

Designing for humans is a profound challenge. The consequences of design shape people’s present and future well-being across individual, social, mental, and physical domains. Despite the rise of human-centred design, failures to understand the true beneficiaries of design decisions continue to produce harmful or ineffective outcomes. Designing well requires insight into the complex psychological systems that govern behaviour, motivation, bias, and decision-making – yet psychological knowledge is rarely integrated systematically into design practice and application. While psychology offers rigorous tools for understanding how people think, feel, and act – and although both designers and psychologists acknowledge the importance of each other’s fields – collaboration remains limited. Existing design approaches, such as those for Human Centered Design, provide process guidance but lack structured mechanisms for embedding psychological principles into everyday practice, leading to a lack of efficacy and unintended consequences in designed outcomes. To address this gap, we propose the Design Psychology Model (DPM): a practical and action-oriented framework for integrating established psychological insights into design. The DPM presents a designer-led process that sets strategic intentions, grounds work in established psychological theory, validates ideas in current contexts, and future-proofs outcomes through ongoing monitoring. The proposed model offers pathways for bridging disciplinary boundaries and invites the wider practitioner community to advance a more rigorous, ethical, and human-attuned design psychology.