Note to self: three learnings from co-creating with young people

1. Overcoming service creators’ assumptions about young people and the lack of services designed specifically for them.

In a co-creation session, a young woman told me: “Your self-esteem is not Facebook’s responsibility”. We were discussing what social media could do to improve her wellbeing, or at least avoid impacting it negatively. Of course, online safety was vital for her, but she didn’t want the service to make assumptions about her needs, motivations and abilities. “An AI would never be nuanced enough to know me how I know myself”, she said. She wanted to have a choice, believing the platform should provide her with tools for her to interact with content, people and her personal data in the way she wanted instead of enabling only a ‘one size fits all’ or ‘all-knowing AI’ type of interaction leading her to create cumbersome workarounds to achieve what she wanted.

Remember: Don’t make assumptions about what young people want or need. Observe, listen and ask questions.

2. Moving from a protection and parental control paradigm to learning healthy digital habits and self-regulation.

Children can often be considered a ‘safety’ measure added on top of pre-existing digital services. Parents and carers are responsible for supervising and restricting children’s use of devices. When I started a project exploring tools for parents and carers to control their children’s digital diet, I thought I would design for the adults to choose, filter and restrict the child’s use of devices. Instead, I found myself designing for (and with) the children when we uncovered that the adults and children wanted the same:

• for children to mindfully own their use of devices and digital activities, self-regulate, learn healthy digital habits and understand their impact on wellbeing (for the better or worse).
• to reduce the moments of friction and endless daily confrontations, the mental load of constantly deciding if ’10 more minutes’ are appropriate, where parents and carers are the gatekeepers of devices.

Remember: The person in charge might be just one of many people you are designing for. You can make everyone a decision-maker and improve everyone’s experience, regardless.

3. Co-creating all aspects of a project, not just the solutions, by working with a young person to craft the projects’ activities, ethics and language.

When I helped my team on a project researching 16–17-year-olds’ access to mental health services, I dared not assume I knew what it was like to be a 16-year-old in London. After all, I had been a teenager in a different country, 20 years earlier, with no phone and no concept of mental health in sight. I encouraged us to have a young person to work with directly, not as a research subject, but as a colleague with lived experience. They helped us understand what was happening in their lives, interpret responses, and design our research activities in a way that made sense to young Londoners. Even then, I made a mistake and was told off by a young person for misinterpreting them and consequently acting ‘creepily’ on social media. Lesson learned!

Remember: When designing products and services for a very specific group of people, welcome them as co-workers. You’ll learn much faster. [And also, don’t be a creep on social media.]