Culture-Centred Framework for Ethical Digital Design: Foregrounding Young people’s Perspectives
Co-designing a practical framework to guide the ethical design of services, products and initiatives supporting young people to maximise the benefits of digital environments.
Our Vision
Young people’s access and engagement with digital environments is rapidly expanding around the world. Despite this, there is a gap in our understanding about how the design of digital products and services translates and interacts with diverse young people’s culture. How does the digital support or undermine young people’s culture? What ethical implications does the digital have for young people located in different parts of the world? How can young people from diverse cultures contribute to the design and development of digital services and products?
Global companies are often encouraged to consider culture when designing for young people around the world. Yet, currently, there is no clear framework to inform culture-centred, ethical design of global digital services and products targeted to young people.
We set out to change this.
By adopting participatory and youth co-research methodologies, we will investigate young people’s understandings of culture and how this intersects with their digital media. We will use this information to develop a framework that will guide the design of digital services and products to move towards a better, inclusive Internet for young people in diverse cultural contexts.
Our Project Plan
We have partnered with MICA and the SEJIWA Foundation to conduct research in Australia, India and Indonesia for the pilot phase of this project. This phase gathers insights from young people to inform the development of a framework that will be further tested and refined in diverse cultures. The four key stages of this project are:
Stage 1: Youth participatory workshops
Four workshops will be held in India, Indonesia and Australia with a total of 120 young people aged 9 to 18 years. These workshops will include fun and interactive activities, such as individual and group-based drawing, writing, discussions, and games. The themes which we explore in the workshops include culture, ethics and responsibilities, design principles, and aspirations of culture-centred design.
Stage 2: Stakeholder workshops
Workshops will be held with service designers, developers and others to test the framework.
Stage 3: International data collection
We plan to extend the project to continue developing and testing the framework in multiple countries using a Distributed Data Generation approach.
Stage 4: Translation activities
Multiple outputs, including a tool that helps designers to build and evaluate a culture-centred approach will be created and available on our website.
What Impact will this research have?
A culture-centred framework provides ethical guidance and best practice recommendations for the design and development of digital services and products targeted to young people cross-culturally.
Collaboration team
The Centre for Development Management and Communication, MICA, Ahmedabad, India
Sustainable Development Goals
The project addresses SDG 10: Reducing inequalities
Streams
Period
December 2023 – December 2024
Contact: If you would like to get in contact with the project team to learn more, please email Louisa Welland at l.welland@westernsydney.edu.au
