Prototyping for Social Wellbeing with Early Social Media Users: Belonging, Experimentation, and Self-Care

Abstract

Many 10-14 year olds are at the early stages of using social media, habits they develop on popular platforms can have lasting effects on their socio-emotional wellbeing. We led a remote innovation workshop with 23 middle schoolers on digital wellbeing, identity exploration, and computational concepts related to social computing. This workshop was a unique opportunity to reflect on emergent habits, discuss them with peers, and imagine oneself as an ICT innovator. Resulting themes related to participants' social wellbeing online included a) sense of belonging to communities of interest, friends, and family, b) self-care and social support strategies involving managing risks, control, and empathy, and c) experimentation while building self-confidence and bravely exploring audience reactions. Participants iteratively designed and tested a sandbox social network website, resulting in Social Sketch. Reflecting on our study, we describe the process for conceptualizing Social Sketch, and challenges in social media innovation with teenagers.

Keywords: ICT; adolescence; cooperative inquiry; prototyping; social media; teenagers; wellbeing; wellness.

Figure 1:

Timeline of iterative design activities.

Figure 2:

Three iterations of Social Sketch with illustrations for the user-generated content component and how they changed over the course of the workshop.

Figure 3:

Example Social Sketch post from a workshop participant. This illustrates how a post appears, after iteration III, with signatures (currently Anonymous but users could change their username), a caption (Art), tags (My Sketches, Nature), and view counts (138).