2021 set off alarm bells for big tech when the courageous whistle-blowers Frances Haugen, Sophie Zhang, and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa made front-page news of irresponsible design of technology – an issue that’s also demonstrated by 5Right’s extensive research.

The digital world is entirely human-made: designers, engineers, and rule-makers can imagine and design the digital world so that children are protected from harm and their rights are upheld. A pioneering new standard shows how.

Many policymakers, civil society organizations, and companies want to bring about a digital world that is designed with children in mind, but until now there has been no guidance as to how, or where to start. So, two years ago, 5Rights and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE SA), set out to address this gap.

In collaboration, we developed the pioneering IEEE 2089-2021 Standard for Age Appropriate Digital Service Framework, published in November 2021. This represents an important milestone as it introduces a series of processes that companies can follow to put young people’s needs at the heart of the design of digital products and services. Supporting global efforts of regulators and organizations seeking to ensure that young people are catered for in the digital world, this practical tool will help deliver age-appropriate design.

As summarised by 5Rights Founder and Chair, Baroness Kidron, “For many years we have asked how to design digital services for children – the IEEE 2089-2021 Standard answers that question.” Now it is not just necessary to make online services fit for children, it is technically feasible. No more excuses.

What does the Standard actually do?

The Standard introduces practical steps that companies can follow in the life cycle of product design to ensure their products and services are age-appropriate. Key areas of the Standard include:

• Recognizing child users
• Meeting children’s diverse needs
• Upholding children’s rights
• Offering fair terms of service
• Presenting information in an age-appropriate way
• Making the best interests of the child a primary consideration in design decisions

The Standard is not the bare minimum; it sets the bar high. But neither is it a ‘ceiling’: it requires designers, engineers, and developers to build digital products and services with children in mind.

 

How was the Standard developed?

The IEEE 2089-2021 Standard was developed by a cross-disciplinary group of experts from across the globe – including from the worlds of telecoms, AI, computer science, and legislation. They all had one thing in common: they were united by the desire to ensure that the digital world is designed with young people in mind.

The Standard was developed over two years and has undergone peer review by the IEEE community. It was published in November 2021.

 

How you can use the Standard

5Rights owes our grateful thanks to IEEE for making the 2089-21 Standard available free of charge. This means that any organization or business can use the framework to design age-appropriate services for children, ushering forth a new era of tech responsibility in which children’s best interests are designed into products by default.

We urge all companies to adopt the 2089-2021 Standard and welcome you to contact us with any comments and experiences you have in using it.

Download IEEE 2089-2021 Standard for Age Appropriate Digital Service Framework PDF

Join us at our webinar event

Please join us on 8 February 2022 at 10:00 EST / 15:00 GMT by registering here, to hear how to design a digital world where children can thrive.

The panel of experts will discuss the creation of the Standard, the gap it addresses, and how it will work in practice. Our Chair, Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE – who will introduce and chair the session – will be joined by:

• Konstantinos Karachalios, Managing Director at IEEE SA.
• Professor Katina Michael, Arizona State University, Chair of the 2089-2021 Standard Working Group.
• Ansgar Koene, Global AI Ethics and Regulatory Leader at EY, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Member of the 2089-2021 Standard Working Group.

The panel discussion will be followed by an interactive Q&A. 

If you have any questions about the Standard or the event, you can contact the 5Rights Foundation here.  

 

Nick Martlew is the Executive Director of 5Rights. He has over fifteen years of experience in policy development, campaigns, and leadership. He helped set up and run Digital Action, and was Crisis Action’s UK Director, Security Lead, and lead author on Creative Coalitions, a handbook for collective campaigns. Nick has previously worked with Oxfam and Save the Children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, the Middle East, and the UK.

This post originally appeared on the Digital Futures Commission website and appears here with permission.

 

Last fall, the Digital Futures Commission (DFC) launched ‘Playful by Design: Free play in a digital world.’ The report looks at a crucial important aspect of children’s development – free play – and at how digital products and services succeed and fail in facilitating it.

At our launch event, Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE and Professor Sonia Livingstone OBE were joined by key experts in the field of free play who discussed and explored our reporting as well as their views on play in the digital space:

• Professor Mimi Ito, University of California – Irvine
• Dr Tim Gill, Rethinking Childhood, Author of Urban Playground
• Dr Sangeet Bhullar, Executive Director, WISE KIDS

We also heard from our Commissioners – Anna Rafferty from Lego, Adrian Woolard from BBC R&D North Lab and Michael Preston from Joan Ganz Cooney Centre – who discussed their experience of developing the DFC’s thinking on play and what they enjoyed most about the journey.

Most importantly we hear from children and young people themselves on what they think about play.

Watch the launch video:

A list of the resources shared in the chat during the launch event is available.

Why is Playful by Design important?

• Free play is essential to the development and growth of children and contributes hugely to their wellbeing.
• With the pandemic, children are spending more time online than ever before, yet many digital services do not facilitate meaningful and imaginative play, and often cause more harm than good.
• We always worry about physical spaces for children — playgrounds, parks — but digital spaces, where they spend so much time, are neglected and not held to the same standards.
• Children have a right to play (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). While there is a growing focus on the need to make the digital world safe for children, we need to go one step further by drawing attention to the need for this environment to be designed as a space where children can thrive.

 

Key findings

• Play in the digital world too often harms instead of enhancing children’s lives:
  • Of the 1000+ 6-17-year-olds surveyed, a greater proportion agreed a lot that they had a great time playing offline (73%) than online (45%).
  • Children told researchers that too often, digital services share their information (49%), expose them to hateful interactions (56%), and make it too hard to disengage (67%).

• Children told us they want to see digital games designed to be age-appropriate and safe, with no commercial exploitation:
  • 58% want more age-appropriate features.
  • 45% want more products and services without advertising.
  • 44% want better control over who can contact them in the game or app.
  • 42% want more products and services that are kind, enable intergenerational play, and where people feel included.
  • 42% want products and services that do not share their data with other apps or businesses.

• Of the eight digital services examined, children enjoy playing on Fortnite, Roblox and TikTok the most, and WhatsApp the least. But:
  • Two-thirds (67%) of children find digital services compulsive, finding it hard to stop playing. Researchers, parents and experts expressed concern about this finding.
  • 54% of children reported experiencing something upsetting in Fortnite while a smaller proportion of children reported experiencing something upsetting in Minecraft (36%), Roblox (46%), Nintendo Wii (48%), WhatsApp (48%), TikTok (43%), Zoom (47%) and YouTube (39%).
  • Commenting on these findings, experts call for more effective moderation, safety-enhancing features, more adaptable settings, and for services to prioritise creativity and stimulation over financial gain.

• Researchers identified eight qualities of free play, and the children consulted added four more to this list: intrinsically motivated; voluntary; open-ended; imaginative; stimulating; emotionally resonant; social; diverse; risk-taking; safety; sense of achievement; immersive.
  • “I feel like I’ve always got opportunities to talk to people with video games. That’s the main point of online, playing with friends while talking to them.” Boy, aged 17
  • “I like to learn all my new dances and film them… I was teaching my Nana a TikTok dance.” – Girl, aged 12
  • “So, when Fortnite went to… the zero event or something, where Fortnite switched off for two weeks. I know my neighbours, the 10 and the 12-year-old, they lost their minds. They’d become almost physically addicted to this game… It’s like they had a withdrawal.” – A theatre-maker working with vulnerable children
  • “I think you should get two […] or three warnings on a social app like TikTok. Because you’ll get someone that could be showing their body parts, and they’ll often get reported, but because there are so many people on TikTok, TikTok doesn’t see immediately.” – Girl, aged 12

You can download a copy of the report here and a presentation of our survey findings here. If you are interested in receiving a hard copy of the report, please fill out your details here and we can send one to you.