Update, Nov. 2023: We are thrilled to share that both of our proposals have been accepted!  Please check out Co-Design for a More Inclusive EdTech Ecosystem (SXSW Edu) and Cultivating Citizenship Through Digital Connections (SXSW) and join us if you’ll be in Austin! We will update with schedule information as soon as we learn more.

 

Suddenly it’s August again. Like us, you might be thinking about how summer has flown by while adjusting to new school schedules, or you might be trying to squeeze in one last holiday. But it’s also SXSW PanelPicker time!

We’ve been working hard with our partners to design some conversations that we’re excited to bring to both SXSW Edu 2024 and SXSW 2024, and we need your support to help get us there. Please take a moment to visit the Panel Picker site before Sunday, August 20th and log in (or create a free account). It’s super easy! You can find our proposals for SXSW (Cultivating Citizenship Through Digital Connections) and SXSW EDU (Co-Design for a More Inclusive EdTech Ecosystem). 

Please spread the word with your networks – and if you have a session that we can support, we’d love to know about it!

 

SXSW: Cultivating Citizenship Through Digital Connections

Can we create online spaces that foster positive behaviors and social experiences that teach users the skills they need to create strong and resilient connections that help them thrive? Video games and social media have been at the center of debates about mental health and a myriad of social issues, but not all digital experiences are created equal. We’ll talk about how we can create a healthier internet by developing good citizens through digital interactions, as well as some of the frameworks that designers can use to build online spaces that foster good citizenship among users of all ages. This session will be moderated by Michael Preston, featuring Tami Bhaumik (Roblox), Jeffrey Burrell (Riot Games), and Katie Salen (UC Irvine).

VOTE HERE: Cultivating Citizenship Through Digital Connections

 

 

SXSW EDU: Co-Design for a More Inclusive EdTech Ecosystem

The current ed tech market is full of products that claim to fulfill lesson plans and make assessment easier for teachers. But what if, in addition to helping kids master important concepts, digital products could make learning truly impactful, and help diverse students and teachers feel empowered and engaged? We’ll talk about how we can bring kids and teachers into the design process in order to create kid-centered products that students enjoy using. We’re excited to talk about how innovators & funders can work together to create a more inclusive ed tech ecosystem that inspires real learning. This session will be moderated by Medha Tare, featuring Joanna Cannon (Walton Family Foundation), Shayla Cornick (Digital Promise), and Sarah Smirnoff (Scratch Foundation).

VOTE HERE: Co-Design for a More Inclusive EdTech Ecosystem

The Cooney Center was thrilled to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Games for Change Festival alongside an incredible community of thoughtful people dedicated to making games and the world better. We always learn so much at the festival and make so many important connections that help us to advance our work. This year was no exception.

The theme of the Cooney Center’s participation in the festival this year was designing digital play for well-being. 

 

Why focus on well-being? Jeff Burrell, Global Head of Social Impact at Riot Games and panelist at the session moderated on July 18 by the Cooney Center’s Michael Preston summed it up perfectly. “If we’re able to make [digital] places where everybody feels like they’ve got a voice, that there is a space for them, they can engage with their friends and make new friends in a safe and healthy way, that will encourage them to continue to play games and to be multigenerational, to invite their parents, to invite their cousins.” By focusing upstream on designing play that contributes to digital thriving, Jeff added, we have an opportunity to make an “outsized impact, not only to the 3 billion people who play games, but to the 90% of young people who are in digital spaces as well”.

For the many designers in the audience who didn’t need to be convinced that designing for well-being is important, the key question is how to do it!

Panelist Kevin Bedau, Head of Product at the Scratch Foundation pointed out that  “When you’re looking at something that’s more subtle, like the outcomes that relate to well-being, having a guidepost to understand how the interactions in concert contribute to these particular outcomes is really helpful”. 

At Scratch, Kevin said that they use “rubrics and approaches for Intentional design as a way to codify not just how you approach innovation and developing new products and features, but also ways to evaluate where and how what you’re building is contributing to the indicators.” Scratch is now in the process of adapting their rubrics and evaluation processes to help them create products that contribute to kids’ well-being and then measure if the design truly has been effective in doing so.

For panelist Carolina Giuga, Senior Director, Government & Public Affairs, Americas at the LEGO Group “the how” is all about asking kids themselves. “When we talk about being child-centric, it is not bringing in kids to test out your product. It is bringing them to codesign with you,” Carolina said.”So one of the questions that our internal team likes to ask the kids when we bring them on board is, if you were in control, what would you change? And it’s mind-blowing, the type of answers that we have and how that has impacted the direction that we’re going with a project.” For example, the LEGO Group worked with kids to develop the emoji keyboard used to help young children communicate their feelings in the social media app LEGO Life.

The following day, more than 50 Games for Change attendees had a chance to try their hand at “building” digital play for well-being at a workshop hosted by the Cooney Center, The LEGO Group, and the Fair Play Alliance.

After learning about the well-being framework developed by the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC initiative) and the practical approach being taken by the Digital Thriving project, the very enthusiastic participants created prototypes of digital play experiences to promote various aspects of well-being.

One example incorporated candles into their game to encourage young players to breathe, thereby helping them with “emotional regulation” (one of the well-being outcomes from the RITEC framework).  

Another group inspired by Playbook for Digital Thriving cookbook-like design instructions envisioned an island game that helped to create meaningful relationships and encourage collaboration between players by allowing them to share biographical information with each other. 

We wrapped up our time at the Festival by cheering for all of the Games for Change Award Winners, including Hall of Change Award winner and former Cooney Center Board Member Alan Gershenfeld and Industry Award winner, the LEGO Group. The LEGO Group was honored, in part, for their co-founding of the RITEC project of which the Cooney Center is honored to be one of the partners.

We look forward to continued fruitful collaborations with the Games for Change community – here’s to the next 20 years and all of the progress we will make together!

 

Along with rolling heat waves, rising gas prices, and the occasional new social media site, the recent news cycle has been dominated by commentary on the potential risks, harms, and benefits children may encounter when interacting with technology. States have made bold attempts to ban social media sites, parents are wondering how to talk to children about A.I. chatbots , and platforms are adding risk-reduction tools. However, it is rarely discussed how to increase children’s well-being in the digital ecosystem that now surrounds their daily activities. 

Pundits advance arguments about both the benefits and risks that interacting with technologies might have for children, and research shows these different outcomes are not arbitrary.  The way an experience is designed is one of the main determinants of whether children have positive or negative experiences when interacting with digital media. Rights-based frameworks for child-centered design have been proposed, but it is not understood how child well-being is integrated into the digital design process in real-world settings. In order to promote industry standards that support children’s positive media interactions, we first need to describe: what does designing for childrens’ digital well-being entail according to industry leaders in child-centered design?

Our research team presented our work exploring these questions at the Interaction Design for Children (IDC) conference in Chicago. We decided to investigate how practitioners conceive of and design for digital child well-being by talking to members of the industry who work for and with children. 

We interviewed content creators, platform designers, user researchers, and founders who work with children about their perceptions of child well-being, how well-being is defined in their company, how they measure it, and how it influences content and feature decisions. These conversations gave us insight into on-the-ground perspectives of these professionals and possible next steps to push the child-centered industry towards a cohesive vision of designing for child well-being.

We saw that practitioners thought of well-being along four levels of increasing scope and breadth of commitment to designing for child well-being:

1. Level 1: In the most narrowly scoped view of child well-being, interviewees focused on experiences that were safe for children. To them, this meant protecting children from online predators, unwelcome ads, and invasive data collection; these practitioners defined well-being as online safety.
2. Level 2: The second level expanded in scope to include usability. Practitioners talked about fostering well-being in digital spaces by both ensuring the child’s safety and their ability to navigate and understand the interface.  
3. Level 3: These conceptualizations further expanded the scope of children’s digital well-being to include: creating safe experiences, creating experiences with developmentally sensitive usability, and creating experiences where the child will learn something through the interaction or content. 
4. Level 4: And then finally,  practitioners who conceptualized well-being at the fourth and broadest level sought to design for safety, usability, learning, and contributing to the meaning of a child’s life. So, while they strived to create experiences for children which encompassed each of the three previous levels they further emphasized designing for empowerment, self-awareness, representation, interpersonal development, and more through the media they were creating. 

One of our participants put this beautifully when they explained the fourth level as:

“…[a] whole-child sort of perspective where the child is not just getting their basic needs met, but they’re also being intellectually stimulated, they feel emotionally safe, they have supportive caregivers, they have close relationships with the adults around. . . it’s feeling free to play and wander and be curious and having stable relationships around you.” 

In addition to these four hierarchical ways we saw practitioners think about digital child well-being, we also noticed that practitioners had different conceptualizations of children and their given autonomy, which influenced how they decided to design for well-being. 

In some instances, designers sought to support children’s well-being by crafting an environment that would direct the child, leading them to specific curated experiences.  In other instances, designers sought to support children’s well-being by crafting an environment that the child could direct and giving them the space to choose what to do, learn, and experience. 

For example, one participant described an industry trend of assuming a lack of capability, which they found disrespectful and at odds with the goal of supporting child well-being. They recounted other designers saying things like, “Oh, kids won’t understand these words. These are too complicated of topics, but I completely disagree.”  They went on to explain that even though children might not be able to pick out all the messaging presented to them, they most often understand the larger ideas and appreciate the topic.

These grassroots insights and ideas from practitioners, we believe, give us a unique perspective on the approaches of people who create products for children, compete in the marketplace, and navigate regulations and best practices. With this knowledge, we believe we can begin to move towards a grounded understanding of digital child well-being and how to design for it.

So what’s next? We see an opportunity for industry practitioners and academic researchers to drive towards consensus around detecting and evaluating when a child has benefited from a digital product, as we saw a discrepancy between the incredible commitment companies make to support digital child well-being and the metrics they use to measure the success of their efforts. Even designers making a level-four commitment to their users said they measure the success of their designs with simplistic measures like seeing “how many kids are playing and for how long,” “minutes per video, minutes per user,” “where we rank,” and “monthly active users.” 

In some instances, participants positioned their success metrics as being in tension with their well-being goals rather than in service of them. Many practitioners expressed wanting to ask deeper questions to evaluate well-being effects with more sophistication, but those are not yet widely accepted in the industry. 

To truly create beneficial digital experiences for children, whether through apps, games, TV, or otherwise, we need to know how to know them when we see them. If “we can’t make what we can’t measure,” as the adage goes, perhaps the next step should be that bridge between our products and their impact. 

 

 

Rotem is a PhD student in the Information School at the University of Washington, co-advised by Dr. Katie Davis and Dr. Amy J Ko. Her research looks at developing metrics for wellbeing design in digital spaces, alongside fostering youth’s technological wisdom.