Based at Harvard Project Zero, The Reimagining Digital Well-Being Project involved teens directly  in a specific quest: design an engaging, useful intervention to support digital well-being. The team’s co-design research led to the discovery of The Grind as a powerful frame for teens to reflect on their lives and stresses, as well as the particular roles of tech. The project also resulted in a “Maker Project for Teen Digital Well-being” that involves a 3-activity sequence adaptable for different groups and contexts. 

Project Zero (PZ) is a research center based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The name might make you wonder if researchers at PZ do nothing! Quite the opposite: our teams are busy working away on many different initiatives focused on high quality research and translational science. Project Zero was founded to lean into problems and topics relevant to young people’s lives and learning - even when there is “zero” existing evidence or research. The spirit of curiosity and inquiry into new topics has carried forward for over 50 years. Today, researchers at Project Zero continue to lean into big, bold questions in both more established areas and in relatively uncharted territory. We are especially committed to uplifting youth voices, and to collaborating with educators and schools.   

The Reimagining Digital Well-being Project was led by Carrie James (a sociologist) and Emily Weinstein (a psychologist), alongside Peter Lange, Chloe Brenner, Beck Tench, Katie Davis, and a terrific teen co-design team. For over a decade, Carrie and Emily have worked together and separately to study different dimensions of adolescents’ digital lives. They always work at the nexus of research and practice, asking questions like: what is it like for young people to grow up in a radically networked world? How can they best be supported to thrive in this context? 

Emily and Carrie shared: “Our YVC project - Reimagining Digital Well-Being - has given us another opportunity to partner with youth and it’s been amazing! First, our teen advisory council first collaborated with us to make sense of survey data from thousands of other teens who had shared their perspectives related to digital life. Teen advisors shared invaluable insights from their own digital lives along the way, and many are featured in a book we wrote called Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing). Once we had a better sense of some of the key opportunities and challenges related to digital well-being, we reconvened our teen co-designers to partner with us to create tools and a powerful process (ultimately, a maker project) to support digital well-being. We learned together about new ways to talk and think about digital well-being, and about the ways adults can help. This whole experience has transformed our thinking about the work we do and how we do it! We’ve continued to build new resources alongside teens, and launched a new project called HX Learn that builds on our Reimagining Digital Well-being Project.Based at Harvard Project Zero, The Reimagining Digital Well-Being Project involved teens directly in a specific quest: design an engaging, useful intervention to support digital well-being. The team’s co-design research led to the discovery of The Grind as a powerful frame for teens to reflect on their lives and stresses, as well as the particular roles of tech. The project also resulted in a “Maker Project for Teen Digital Well-Being” that involves a 3-activity sequence adaptable for different groups and contexts.

Project Zero (PZ) is a research center based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The name might make you wonder if researchers at PZ do nothing! Quite the opposite: our teams are busy working away on many initiatives focused on high-quality research and translational science. Project Zero was founded to lean into problems and topics relevant to young people’s lives and learning - even when there is “zero” existing evidence or research. The spirit of curiosity and inquiry into new topics has carried forward for over 50 years. Today, researchers at Project Zero continue to lean into big, bold questions in both more established areas and in relatively uncharted territory. We are especially committed to uplifting youth voices and collaborating with educators and schools.  

The Reimagining Digital Well-Being Project was led by Carrie James (a sociologist) and Emily Weinstein (a psychologist), alongside Peter Lange, Chloe Brenner, Beck Tench, Katie Davis, and a terrific teen co-design team. For over a decade, Carrie and Emily have worked together and separately to study different dimensions of adolescents’ digital lives. They always work at the nexus of research and practice, asking questions like: what is it like for young people to grow up in a radically networked world? How can they best be supported to thrive in this context?

Emily and Carrie shared: “Our YVC project - Reimagining Digital Well-Being - has given us another opportunity to partner with youth, and it’s been amazing! First, our teen advisory council collaborated with us to make sense of survey data from thousands of other teens who had shared their perspectives related to digital life. Teen advisors shared invaluable insights from their own digital lives along the way, and many are featured in a book we wrote called Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing). 

Once we had a better sense of some of the key opportunities and challenges related to digital well-being, we reconvened our teen co-designers to partner with us to create tools and a powerful process (ultimately, a maker project) to support digital well-being. We learned together about new ways to talk and think about digital well-being and the ways adults can help. This whole experience has transformed our thinking about the work we do and how we do it! We’ve continued to build new resources alongside teens and launched a new project called HX Learn that builds on our Reimagining Digital Well-being Project.

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• If you're wondering how to talk with teens about digital well-being, consider starting with the idea of "the grind." Ask teens: In what ways do you hustle or feel like you should hustle? In other words, in what areas do you feel like you should always be “grinding”? (Then, consider ways tech and social media make pressures more or less intense: How does tech play a role - making that grind better or worse?)
  
  
• Adults tend to get hyper-focused on tech as the main culprit. We default to questions like: Is TikTok making you depressed? Is Instagram causing anxiety? Are you addicted to your phone? But for many teens, the good and bad of tech are wrapped up in the other stresses and pressures they're feeling. Zooming out and thinking about their whole lives and well-being first sets the stage for investigating the role of tech in more nuanced and relevant ways.
  
  
• HX - short for “Human Experience” is an emerging field focused on the ways tech fits into our lives as human beings. Our work with youth reinforced our sense that HX is a valuable lens for exploring key issues and questions relevant to teens, tech, and digital well-being. We also saw huge power in co-design methods and youth advisory!
  
  
• Involving youth on our research and design team - privileging their perspectives and expertise in key ways throughout the lifespan of a project - fundamentally changed the way we work. We see co-design as an essential method for digital well-being initiatives.
  
  
• We’ve created an ongoing youth advisory council that will shape our work moving forward, including building out additional resources and materials for teens, schools, and more. We’re also thinking about how cross-generational partnerships can lead to more relevant and wise interventions. ‍
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• Our project has us thinking bigger and more intentionally about dissemination and impact: how do we get good ideas out to the public?