Into the Digital Future: Designing Children’s Digital Play for Well-Being with Shuli Gilutz

In this episode of Into the Digital Future, Shuli Gilutz speaks with Jordan Shapiro and Laura Higgins about the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative, led by The LEGO Group and UNICEF and funded by the LEGO Foundation. They discuss the RITEC-8 framework, developed through research conducted with over 750 children in 18 countries. Shuli discusses the release of the RITEC Design Toolbox, which has been created as a set of tools for design teams to support their integration of these ideas in their work designing digital play. Tune in to learn how well-designed digital play experiences can help foster children’s well-being.

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here, and learn more about the season. 

Shuli Gilutz: It’s great to be here. Hi everyone. My name is Shuli Gilutz. I work for the UNICEF child rights and business team headquartered in Geneva, currently located in Tel Aviv, in Israel. And my role is actually working with business on behalf of UNICEF to help promote and protect children’s rights.

So our team develops tools and engages with industry to help promote children’s rights in practice. 

Jordan Shapiro: We have tons of questions about children’s rights coming up, but the first thing I want to know about is, so you have this really interesting background. It’s both education, psychology and user experience design, right? UX design. Tell me about that. Tell me about your inspiration, your motivation. How do you think about design from an educational perspective? 

Shuli Gilutz: Thanks. That’s a great question. Cause I’ve been in UNICEF only for a short while, so a little over a year and actually prior to that, for the past 20 plus years, I’ve been more in the children’s design and tech industry, thinking about how to design best for children, child-centered design, age-appropriate design, and I’ve been both in academia and industry, and that’s been something that’s been driving my work throughout all these years was, really, what’s the best for kids technologies out there. Obviously, it can afford so many things for everybody. And it is whether we like it or not.

So how do we design it? That’s this kids’ developmental stage, but also their interests and their passions and their growth and their thriving. And also protect them, of course even though there’s been a lot of work on that side. So yeah, on the academic side, I was at Stanford’s Learning Design and Technology program and later got my PhD at Columbia in psychology, really understanding how children understand interfaces or novel interfaces in cognitive psychology and educational psychology.

And then I taught for many years in academia, both in the U.S. and Israel looking at children’s HCI, so human computer interaction, which is later in industry, translated into UX, which is very cool to see these academic methods that take months in understanding the users and how people interact with technology.

In companies, they’re like, you have five days to think of the study, do the study, analyze the study, give us the findings and yo, what should we design? So that’s UX. 

Jordan Shapiro: And what’s the coolest example of that you could give us? 

Shuli Gilutz: I think the biggest challenge is navigation. When we had to look at different navigational systems for children and design teams and product teams always assume it’s like adults. Or it’s something that they have this myth about children. It has to have all these childlike things, which is obviously neither. So children can use systems designed for adults pretty easily, if they’re designed well. So it’s not about being designed for adults, it’s about good design. But sometimes their motivation is different. Their context is different. What they’re interested in is different. So they’re not going to have the same kind of user journey as adults.

And when you talk to design teams or product teams, they don’t listen. They’re like, “Oh, but so and so at this huge company does it, and it works.” I’m like, how do you know it works? Have you seen children do that? “No, but they’re selling.” I’m like, how do you know? So until you have them sit with children of that specific age group of that context, because that obviously matters as well, and see that they don’t get it until that moment, it’s just “Oh, come on, Shuli, we know you have a PhD, but who cares? This is business and blah, blah, blah.” So all these years, it was always like, how do you get the foot in the door to have all the stakeholders? Because once you have that experience, they’re like, “Oh, how do we get more of this?” Because everybody wants to understand what children are experiencing to make it better for them.

I think that was my kind of professional route.. When this opportunity for this project came up, I’m like, wow, thinking about child rights and well-being and actually serving that to companies and how to work with that. That’s amazing. That’s what I would have needed. as a practitioner to help me get those buy-ins from executives and to understand how children think.

I’ve also been involved in Designing for Children’s Rights for many years. It’s a non-profit organization, like a grassroots organization with designers from all over the world, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do. We took the child rights framework and basically used it to create design guidelines based on that to help us with that kind of in-house convincing of everybody of how to design best for kids just using this kind of vetted, global, accepted framework rather than just saying, oh, but I know from my experience working with kids, which, usually it doesn’t. It doesn’t work. 

Laura Higgins: Yeah. Okay, that’s a perfect segue then. Let’s talk about the RITEC project. Tell us about the goals in advancing child rights in digital environments. 

Shuli Gilutz: Okay. The RITEC project is a really cool project, which I joined only in the last part. So it’s been around four years, and this is the last, um, bright tech means responsible innovation and technology for children.

And it’s a collaboration, a partnership between the LEGO Group and UNICEF, which is also rare. And it’s sponsored by the LEGO Foundation, which has been supporting this whole process. And the goal was really to undergo research and studies to understand what well-being means for children in digital play.

So this started around COVID. Everybody saw children at home with screens playing. It was clear that there’s value in this. It’s very important. And at the same time, all these ideas for legislation and for ideas of taking screen time and all this discussion of screen time, which It’s a whole other discussion, but it’s a very problematic term, as I know you guys agree.

So how do you explain what’s going on? We see that there’s value, but we also see that people are worried. So the idea was to actually go and do our own research. We wanted to talk to children all over the world, which is a big emphasis for UNICEF, to understand from children, what do they think? What’s good for them? When do they feel it’s good for them? When do they not feel comfortable? That it isn’t supporting their well-being, and try to derive a framework for that which we can then serve to industry and say, here, if you want to design for children’s well-being, these are principles you should follow.

So that was how it started. The first phase was creating the framework and then it was validating, empirically validating the framework. Each one of these first two research stages were conducted with Academics from all over the world that did an amazing job. And they’re also working on publishing their papers and current conferences.

Jordan Shapiro: I think I read there was 34, 000 kids or something that is something ridiculously high number, 

Shuli Gilutz: Not 34, 000, but we had more than 700 children in both studies that we actually talked to. We did base it on some more UNICEF Innocenti Office of Research and Innovation.

They are doing another global survey. With tens of thousands of children, we use that information as well, but for this project, we actually talked to more than 700 children from 13 countries. 

Jordan Shapiro: Do you mind if we go through the eight dimensions of the framework? Can we read each one off for you and you tell us what the recommendations are for each one? 

Shuli Gilutz: Oh, for sure. 

Jordan Shapiro: All right. I’ll start. So Identity and self expression. 

Shuli Gilutz: Okay. So identity and self expression, the idea here is that it’s part of a developmental process for children to engage in identity.

So we have that many play patterns. Not digital that we know, there’s dress up play and makeup and you play with a dollhouse and all these, even if you’re running around playing different roles and you’re chasing one another, you’re trying out different identities.

And this play pattern can be also found obviously in digital play. And that has been found to be very supportive of children’s well-being. That’s that. And also we see that also a big, in relationship to the DEI factor because when you’re trying out different identities, so let’s say now you’re playing a mom and taking care of the kids or a dad and taking care of the kids and now you’re playing a sibling and now you’re playing a warrior and now you’re playing a caregiver and now you’re playing a computer scientist or whatever.

You can try different ethnicities, different genders, and different ages. And children get to try these out, and it’s very important for their development, and they love it. 

Jordan Shapiro: Next one’s emotions. 

Shuli Gilutz: Emotions is a great one, because it’s not only what we think of as emotions. So we found that in digital play, children have an opportunity to experience a range of emotions. They can get excited and motivated, but they can also get angry and upset and lose. And that’s fine. But then you have the opportunity to learn how to regulate emotions, to learn how to play, to learn how to play in a team. What do you do when your teammate doesn’t play? And Minecraft ruins everything for you.

So how do you deal with that? But also of course, just to enjoy. So it’s a great opportunity for children to experience all that and learn from it. 

Jordan Shapiro: How about creativity and imagination? 

Shuli Gilutz: I think that’s the obvious one, especially to anybody who played any sandbox or open ended, a gaming environment, children can create endlessly. So it’s really endless in terms of just the time and the way you have to do the tools you have for creation. If it’s art, if it’s science, if it’s building and construction, endless. 

Laura Higgins: I love this next one. I think it really speaks to the kind of Maslow theory, but the sense of competence and achievement. Tell us about that. 

Shuli Gilutz: Yes, this is, I love it too. It’s also perceived competence. It’s competence because in a lot of games you learn real skills. It could be. educational technology. It could be things that you learn elsewhere. There’s even research that you become better at. You can be better surgeons if you play video games.

So these are real skills you learned, but it’s also a perceived sense of competence, meaning that you get better. You start something, you fail, and then you get better. And the opportunity to fail is something that we don’t have a lot in life, especially kids today. So perceived competence is amazing.

Jordan Shapiro: Relationships? 

Shuli Gilutz: So relationships is another one that’s tricky, because it’s about relationships with people around you and also with yourself. So what do we mean by that? The idea is that a lot of digital technology affords you the opportunity, and I said we started this during COVID, to actually play with your friends.

You can play side by side if you’re both playing together. One person’s playing, the other’s watching. You can play multiplayer. You could play with your cousin who lives in another town, or your grandparent who lives somewhere else, or if you’re, parents, divorced parents, and so forth. So you can have all these opportunities to play, but also you can play on your own, and we found that’s very important for children.

And for adults, to have that time sometimes to tune out, like they’ve been at school, they’ve been interacting with everybody, now they just need time to be in flow with themselves. And that’s also very important. So we put that also into relationships because it’s a spectrum. 

Laura Higgins: I love that. As a person who really finds a lot of therapeutic time playing LEGO, that really speaks to me: Autonomy and control. 

Shuli Gilutz: Yes. So this is another one that’s super important for child development and that children today, unfortunately, lack in many areas. especially in the many developed countries in the way they’re limited in their life. So the ability to take control of what you’re doing and just be independent without people telling you what to do all the time, have free play.

And you have that in many open-ended environments. You can do whatever you want. You will have consequences, but you learn and you have full control of whatever you want. And I think it’s just, we know from developmental research how important it is for children. And if you don’t have it, you become an adult and you didn’t experience that.

There are effects that are very negative, but also it’s just joyful and what children want when they’re growing up, 

Jordan Shapiro: Next one is diversity. 

Shuli Gilutz: So diversity, equity, and inclusion, of course it’s critical and they’re actually two dimensions that we call them basic dimensions. It’s things that we have to have. Not all dimensions must be in all games, and I’ll get to that later. But this one, DEI, is so important, for two reasons that we’ve seen when we’re talking to children. One, representation. Children wanted to see themselves in the game. Children wanted to see what they could be and that they’re part of this.

They’re not excluded. And this means all kinds of diversity. Gender, ethnicity, age, ability. All these things, but also this is important for accessibility. So to include children, and especially in UNICEF, we talk about at the most vulnerable kids. So a lot of children told us that they couldn’t play the game because it was very heavy on internet use and it was expensive.

So they had to log out or, of course, in-app purchases is a big problem for children who don’t have those funds or access to those funds. So if you’re thinking about accessibility, it’s both for people that have challenges with interfaces, but also financial and having Wi-Fi the whole, all the time and all these things that many children talked about in different countries.

Laura Higgins: The digital divide is still very real around the world, isn’t it? The final one is really my bread and butter, which is the safety and security angle. 

Shuli Gilutz: I have to talk to you about that later. But yes, this is, of course, the number one. So we can’t have the others. And this actually came from children, which we were happy to hear, they said they want to play in an environment.

They feel safe and nobody wants to be bullied. Nobody wants to feel like this is not somebody is using their data. Somebody can approach them. They want to feel safe in the same way they feel safe to play at home, the same way they feel safe if they do to play in a playground. They know that it was designed for them, that the people around are protecting them.

They don’t have to worry about that. They want to assume the same thing for their digital environment. So this is a must while the others are more like nice to have, depending on the audience, depending on the experience you want to design. This is not an optional thing. This is the basic thing for well-being for your players.

Jordan Shapiro: I love that. I love all eight of these dimensions. I feel like it’s the same as what you have to do in a classroom, what you do have to do at a play date. Like anytime it’s involves kids, all these things are equally important, but what does it look like?

So how do you put them all together in a digital space? Although I’m imagining most of our listeners can already imagine, but maybe you have a few more words to say about it. 

Shuli Gilutz: That’s a great question. First of all, to comment on your comment, I think children view it the same.

They don’t think there’s a difference between the classroom or the outside place for them, it’s the same thing. So it’s only us. We’re stuck in this divide of digital and the rest of the world. But that’s just, I agree. 

Jordan Shapiro: I agree. 

Shuli Gilutz: But how do we design for it? So we don’t design everything all at once.

There’s no one game that has everything that solves all the problems for all the kids all the time. There’s no such thing. Because children are different and even if a child in the same day can at some point want to play FIFA with their friends and you know be all excited and then play on their own and just go into flow and zone out and both will be really good for their well-being.

So it’s not that there’s one thing you should always include. So there are different dimensions of it and they line up for children with different needs. and different interests and different passions and different abilities. So really the first thing to do is in any child-centered design process, understand your audience, understand the experience you want to design, and then which mechanics will support that in terms of their well-being.

Always add safety, try to always add diversity, equity, and inclusion, but then you may only need one dimension or a few dimensions to achieve what you’re trying to achieve. 

Jordan Shapiro: Yeah. It completely makes sense. And of course, at least the way I’m thinking about this is, when people are designing for kids, what are the criteria that they’re aiming for?

Is it money? Is it attention? Is it stickiness? Is it, and this is really saying, how do you, I want to make sure that the whole audience gets this, right? This is really saying, how do you put well-being right at the center as a goal? And what are the things, what are the criteria?

It’s almost like a checklist, right? You can go, how well are we doing this? 

Shuli Gilutz: It’s not a checklist. And actually in our FAQs, we have that question. Is it a checklist? Because many designers ask me, is this a checklist? I don’t want designers to think, Oh, I need to add something for autonomy. I need to add something for, you know, DI well for DIS, but not for the other ones.

Because it’s not a checklist. You have to understand your audience and you have to understand what you’re designing for and then design for it. However. The two basic ones. So the two kind of foundational dimensions, the one of safety and security and the one for diversity, equity, and inclusion should always be inclusive because they create the basis for well-being, but the rest, it’s really about what you’re trying to create.

If you’re creating this world of creativity that you’re on your own or you’re creating, it could be a casual game. You’re playing with friends. That’s a whole totally different thing. And they can both be great for children’s well-being, but you really have to know what you’re designing for. 

Jordan Shapiro: I love it.

I think it’s such a concise, clearly defined framework. And I encourage our listeners to read about it in more detail, even though we’ve just described it in a lot of detail. But still we’ll have the links below so that people can read about it, but I do want to switch gears for a second and just to ask you, in your opinion, how has children’s interaction with digital technology changed over the past, I don’t know, decade, two decades, the long haul.

And what do you see as where we are going? How do you think AI is going to change things? I know a lot of people are wondering if AI is going to change things, how it’s going to change things. In many ways we’ve talked about on this podcast, how it’s already changed lots of things, but it’s only going to do it more, would be my guess, I don’t know. Let me ask you, are you worried? 

Shuli Gilutz: So I don’t know. I do think I agree with you a hundred percent. It’s a game changer. It’s definitely a game changer and we’re not even understanding how big of a game changer it is yet because that takes time just to see where it’s going.

So for sure, but I think what’s interesting is when we look at children, and we see that through other kinds of, events that happened over the years, right? If it was the internet themselves and we had mobile phones and the iPad and all these things changed the way childhood happened and even changed the way we what we knew about child development.

We didn’t know children could navigate on their own in a virtual environment age two and a half because when we study developmental psychology and PSA said they weren’t, they were in concrete thinking and then children on iPads were like, going on YouTube and looking for things at age two, and we’re like, wait a second.

What’s going on? So there are all these things that we learn. It’s not that children are affected by it. Children are the same. But we’re just giving them new opportunities and new environments that they can act. And so if you talk to children today, they know about AI. And they’re not too impressed. They’re like, okay, cool.

Yeah, I created that song, it did this rap thing for me. Let’s ask AI, can I try to do my homework on it. Whatever. They don’t see what we see, which is like, Oh my God, our jobs are gone. The world is doomed. Nobody will know what’s true and what’s not because they’re growing up with it.

I think, again, the focus is always about content, context and specific children in different environments, but in a lot of AI literacy. So the fact that there’s discussion about it and discussion of where the children are, so they’re aware, will really help them be smart at it. And of course, regulation.

That’s a slow process. AI is so fast. So we have to work internally as designers and design teams and product teams that are developing environments for children. To have our own moral compass, because it will be a while until regulation catches up, because AI keeps changing. It’s a moving target.

And we also have to talk to our audience and have children be aware, but we can’t put the responsibility on them, because that’s, We can’t. That’s not fair. And of course, that won’t work. And we also can’t put it on parents because parents are obviously busy. They don’t have time to get updated on AI and stuff.

But also, some children don’t have the luxury of having parents that can support them on this. Either parents are working or they just don’t have parents at home. And those are the most vulnerable children that we want to look out for. The responsibility is on us. And on us, I mean us UNICEF, but also us industry and anybody who’s designing these environments for kids to make sure that we’re looking at this because this is very fast.

So I don’t think it’s the end of the world. I think it’s going to be interesting. But we should be aware all the time because it’s a higher level of alert than we had before. And it’s so much faster. 

Laura Higgins: I love that framing, Shuli, I think, let’s bring it back down to earth a little bit.

I think we get very caught up in some of these as you say, Oh, it’s really scary. Where’s it going to end? But I’m also looking forward to us having a conversation in a year’s time. And seeing what we have learned and whether actually any of those fears came to reality. I, the work that we do at Roblox we very much are all around collaborating with organizations such as UNICEF and working with other tech industry friends, to, for the greater good.

But what are we still missing? If there was just one thing where you really wanted to see us working on children’s digital rights and well-being, what would it be? 

Shuli Gilutz: That’s a great question. I think transparency, and I think it’s a tough one for companies, especially big companies like Roblox, because you have many moving parts and many departments and not everybody’s always aligned.

But I think it’s I think from a children’s side, I remember I did a study years ago when the voice assistant started coming out and everybody thought this was the next big thing and we were talking to children about it and they’re like, wait a second. So they can hear when I’m coming home from school, they come to hear when I’m going back.

Their jokes, I was like, I’m too funny, like they, so once you start asking the questions and being transparent and then they didn’t care, they’re like, okay, fine. So they know my favorite color is blue and my favorite food is sushi and whatever. And they don’t care. So they have my data in that sense, but I don’t want them having my data when I come back from school.

So they have their ideas, but this is a conversation to be had. So I do think that it’s not showing a weakness, being transparent about everything that’s going on. I think it actually empowers. the users and it creates trust in the company. And that’s also relating to something you said earlier, Jordan about, costs and, getting users coming back and so forth.

I think that these ideas, the right tech ideas and the right tech design toolbox that we develop for people to apply it actually help you make better products and gain trust with your audience. And it’s actually good for business. This is not bad for business. This is Better for business because if you have a game that’s great to play, promotes well-being for children, you’re happier as a customer.

Parents are happier. You’re trustworthy because you’re making it safe. So it’s definitely good for business. But I think that’s a shift that a lot of leaders in this area have to understand that this will actually make them on the front lines and create the golden standard in the industry rather than, Oh no, we have to put money into, user acquisition and getting, do this, have amazing products and you’ll have the business.

Jordan Shapiro: I just have one more question for you as we wrap up, which is how do we get kids to read more books? 

Shuli Gilutz: You have to write good books for that. So I think, you know what, that’s an amazing question because it’s almost like the screen time question, right? So when people talk about screen time and we say, no, it’s not about the screen time.

It’s about the content, the context and the specific child here. It’s also about the book. So when Harry Potter came out, kids were already on screens. But they left the screens instead of reading these 500-page books. All night in the middle of dinner because it was amazing. And there were other books like that.

So it’s not the only series. So once you have great content and it doesn’t matter which medium it is, You’re gonna get the people. They’re very sophisticated kids today. You have to have good stuff and I think actually we’ve seen all these really cool things where The different media promote each other. So if you have a tick tock about a book and they’re talking about it Then they’re referring to it on YouTube and there’s a game.

And That’s all connected, I think that really helps because that’s how children today view their world. It’s all interconnected between the different media. And children are reading books, but yeah, I’d like my kids to read more books. 

Laura Higgins: I think that was a brilliant example. And it threw me right back to when I was a kid.

And actually that kind of cross-pollination across all different media, that’s not new. Because I used to love the kind of choose your own adventure books. And particularly like the E. Livingstone Real Fantasy. I know Ian, I’ve met him through his work with the games industry and games workshop. He is an amazing storyteller.

He’s very much involved in video games, the whole Dungeons and Dragons world and tabletop games. But it all started with books, and so that, that is, that’s not a new thing, but yeah, I’d love to see much more of that as well. 

Jordan Shapiro: Thank you so much. It’s been such a fascinating conversation. Is there anything we should have asked you about that we haven’t yet? 

Shuli Gilutz: The only thing is I’d like to share that we are soon going to launch our RITEC Design Toolbox. So the framework we discussed, we’ve actually developed tools for design teams to apply them easier. Because we’ve heard from designers that they don’t want to read the 60-page report, which is too bad because it’s an amazing report, and it’s beautiful. But we hear you and we worked with designers to develop this toolbox of how you could use it in the design process without reading the report. So that’s gonna come out on November 18th. We’re gonna have a global online launch for it and I’ll share more, but yeah, I hope that’s going to be useful for many out there who want to really apply this in their work. 

Laura Higgins: Wonderful. We’ll make sure to share the links with our listeners as well. Thank you so much, Shuli.