Goal

• Our goal is to combine the rigour of scientific methods with art-based practices to establish an action-based, transdisciplinary framework that will accelerate digital innovations for human flourishing (e.g., social platforms for identifying values that drive identity development; video-sharing apps for constructing coherent self narratives).
• Young people–having grown up with tablets in their cribs and phones in their high chairs–no longer experience their digital, online interactions and physical, offline interactions as functionally distinct. Generation Z live digitally immersed lives, in a hybrid ecosystem in which they socialize, go to school, express their creativity, explore their identity and establish the foundations for their future wellbeing. Yet few scientists are joining the development teams that could design these spaces for flourishing.
• Projects at this transdisciplinary intersection must go beyond conceptual models and flowcharts and focus on action, manifesting in the design and deployment of digital innovations that combine the science of human flourishing with the transformative power of art to support young people's emotional and social development.
• With global impact, a focus on young people's wellbeing, and a transdisciplinary action mandate, we are directly in line with the Foundation's strategy.

Opportunity

• Research has focused on negative correlates of digital participation: depression, violence, addiction. But work in sociology, digital anthropology, and design shows an inspiring array of digital spaces that augment emotional, cognitive, and social flourishing.
• Meta-analyses show that when social scientists design technology, it lacks the "special sauce" for enhancing wellbeing: engagement and playfulness. Youth avoid boring, ugly, didactic digital spaces. We need artists and designers to help develop intrinsically motivating technologies.
• Innovations will be especially targeted towards "the next billion users" (the generation of digital participants from low-resourced areas around the world that will soon migrate online).

Roadblocks

• One challenge is getting a transdisciplinary network of scholars and practitioners (e.g., social scientists, engineers, designers, artists) to agree on a framework for designing, evaluating, and deploying novel digital spaces. Difficulties include agreeing on definitions of digital participation and flourishing and measuring the impact of artistic approaches to enhancing wellbeing with scientific rigour.
• Furthermore, billion-dollar corporations that have little interest in enhancing human flourishing dominate most of the internet. They are not interested in science-based innovations if that science (a) takes too long to establish and (b) does not contribute to a profitable product.

Breakthroughs Needed

• To establish a transdisciplinary framework that has a demonstrable impact on the digital ecosystem of young people, we need to inspire diverse communities (e.g., scientists, designers, engineers, and artists) to work on transformative technologies. A transdisciplinary hub will need to be established with summer schools, quarterly workshops, and team-based projects with deliverables to help attract and train young researchers, artists, and designers to work together consistently from the outset of their careers.
• New research methods can be developed that combine science- and design-based practices that are agile and yield just-in-time data on effectiveness, processes of engagement, and retention levels. We can also create transformative prototypes and collect data to show how and why they work. These prototypes can be shared not only with the science community, but with stakeholders such as educators, policy makers, parents, and youth themselves.
• We will not change the incentive structure of massive corporations like Facebook and Google, but if we demonstrate that our prototypes focused on flourishing are more attractive and engaging to many young people who prefer them over coercive technologies, our design models may be copied by these large companies and deployed globally, making our impact on wellbeing exponential.

Key Indicators of Success

• 3 years: Determine whether participants of transdisciplinary activities (summer school, workshops) have integrated and implemented action-based framework, and whether concrete prototypes of transformative technologies are usable and ready for pre-registered studies.
• 5 years: Success of prototypes tested with pre-registered studies tapping individual-based, process-level outcomes of flourishing; design methodologies will be used to track engagement, retention, and social "spread".
• 10 years: Global engagement and use will be tracked, with the goal of reaching more than 100,000 people per year; Implementation and impact measures show that youth who participate in these transformative technologies are thriving in targeted domains

Additional Information

This summary establishes the historically unique period we are living in and the relevance to the next generation of youth growing up online. With the inception of the internet and mobile digital connections, the majority of societies are in the midst of a massive transformation–one that denotes a paradigm shift reminiscent of the advent of the printing press and the industrial revolution (Granic & Lamey, 2000). Young people especially are immersed daily in their digital contexts and, despite the media panic, longitudinal studies show this digital migration does not foment dire consequences for wellbeing (Jensen et al., 2019). Adolescents in the United States are on their smartphone or other screen devices on average 9 hours daily, not including time spent on homework (Common Sense Census: Rideout, 2015). Most relevant for human flourishing, most young people use their devices for social interactions (Lenhart, 2015). These statistics are not constrained to affluent families or Western countries: Russia leads mobile subscriptions worldwide, Asia is in lockstep with Europe, and many parts of Africa have similarly high rates of mobile technology use (World Bank Group, 2018). Critically, 1 billlion new users are expected to come online over the next decade, mostly from developing countries/continents including India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East (Arora, 2019).
We are only at the beginning of the development of the social, interactive, Web 2.0–the Internet as we currently experience it. At this early stage, mammoth technology companies have no doubt unleashed challenges at individual, social, and societal levels (Livingstone & Third, 2017). People themselves are often not consciously choosing the online spaces in which they find themselves, machine learning algorithms are. But new platforms will and have emerged–some that represent entirely new incentive structures and inspiring counterpoints of supportive social spaces explicitly designed for flourishing. Yet, very few scientists are contributing to understanding these spaces. Humans remain the same beings who evolved to communicate face to face, with minimal tools, mainly in small groups, uniquely differentiated from our primate cousins by our storytelling proclivities (Harari, 2015). With these evolutionarily ancient storytelling impulses in mind, it is important to understand how they can be harnessed to ensure social and emotional thriving for the next generation. Our "big idea" asks:
How do we help inform the design and deployment of transformative technologies that can enhance and satisfy youths' identity-relevant storytelling impulses?
What are the platforms and properties of technologies that elevate social connection, promote empathy, help youth develop coherent narrative identities, all while they remain digitally engaged, as they surely will?
Scientists cannot address these questions confined to their disciplinary silos. A transdisciplinary framework is critical to establish, one that is aimed at discovering novel, emergent solutions for flourishing that are developed through the contributions of exceptional designers, inspired artists, rigorous engineers using ethical AI practices, and scientists who can evaluate, through open-science practices, the impact of these novel solutions.

References:
https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1820214
https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1820225
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-a0034857.pdf
https://www.jmir.org/2019/1/e11528/
https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702619859336

Collaborators:
Candice Odgers
Eveline Crone
Gillian Hayes
Amy Orben
Payal Arora