Exploring Children’s Attitudes Towards Notions of Digital Good/Bad through Hybrid Arts Practice

Story Research Group

Image credit: Dylan Yamada-Rice

Project title: Exploring Children’s Attitudes Towards Notions of Digital Good/Bad through Hybrid Arts Practice

Funded by: ESRC Digital Good Network

Funding amount: £50,000

Project duration: August 2023 – November 2024

Project partners: Dr Eleanor Dare (X||dinary Stories), Angus Main (Royal College of Art), Professor John Potter (University College London), Professor Steve Love (The Glasgow School of Art)

University of Plymouth PI:

Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice

More information: ESRC Digital Good Network

The project focused on children’s attitudes to concepts of digital good/bad. It did this by scaffolding physical materials with digital ones to allow children with limited access to technologies and the internet to take part in knowledge generation that traditionally excluded them due to digital poverty.

Project objectives:

To establish a specialist network of researchers and practitioners from academic and commercial organisations, whose work intersects with emerging ethical questions related to children’s use of digital technology.
Through network events, complete a collaborative literature and practice review related to this topic, and identify key questions for research.
To develop research methodologies that use both analogue and digital creativity to engage children in questions related to their use of technology and to share these with the wider Digital Good Network.
To conduct small-scale research with children aged 8-13 to better understand their positive and negative attitudes towards digital, virtual, and emerging technologies.
To evaluate children’s engagement/disengagement with the workshops and insight into whether children have explored these topics previously and if they would like to learn more.

Montage of images showing concepts of digital good/bad practice

Dylan Yamada-Rice

6. To report research findings back to the wider Digital Good Network and identify gaps and topics for future research.

Children in masks on a spider's web climbing frame

Phone design exercise sheet with panda character

This project built on the team’s previous work, which had taught children about digital sensors and the data they could collect about them, and used speculative design to create tools to subvert or block these sensors. The scope of this project was broader, aiming to explore the attitudes of 9- to 13-year-olds towards concepts of digital good and bad, and how their knowledge and perceptions may differ from those of adults. It was part of the wider ESRC Digital Good Network and sought to address their central question: 'What should a good digital society look like, and how do we get there?' by focusing specifically on children as currently overlooked users of digital technology and emerging digital citizens.

Understanding children’s ideas and knowledge is crucial for shaping our collective vision and actions, and the project was embedded in considering the ethical implications of digital, and emerging technologies.

Dylan Yamada-Rice

This was achieved through public-facing knowledge exchange events that led to hybrid art workshops for children to imagine and shape possible 'digital good' futures, where technology use was ethical, responsible, and inclusive. In doing so, the project contributed to the Digital Good Network by working directly with children who were generally marginalised in the development of emerging technologies and software, and specifically in relation to research about digital good. Additionally, many children in deprived areas were invisible due to their lack of home Wi-Fi access and limited means to use, often shared, technologies.

The research utilised interdisciplinary creative methods drawn from arts education, which are currently under-taught in formal primary and secondary education yet create opportunities for experimentation, critique, and self-expression – elements fundamentally linked to better well-being.