The YDCL
Resource Library

The Tech Futures Wheel is a participatory, speculative exercise which invites participants to go beyond the constraints of the present, and optmistically ask: ‘What do truly meaningful digital futures look like?’. The activity proceeds to engage with what values, practices and peoples are needed to bring this to life.  

Each technology tends to assume a default user, mostly an adult. This activity is designed to complicate that homogenous notion by asking how technology needs to look from the vantage point of people through different stages of life. By taking this view, we ask: what does i take to design truly multigenerational technologies. Participants explore what technology should look and feel like, what values should be centered, and who should be involved in building it.

They engage with  three different age groups (5, 22, and 55 years olds) across five stages: Centering Human Experience, Guiding Principles for Technology Design, Tech Design Features, Stakeholder Composition and What Feels Unresolved?

Research on young people and digital joys suggests that joyful digital experiences can range between genuine fulfilment and a low-grade drain that keeps pulling people back without really satisfying them. This activity invites young people to slow down and examine the quality of their digital experiences, not just how much time they spend online, but examine the experience of the time spent. Participants reflect on what energises them, what drains them, what feels ‘worth it’, and what does not. Participants also begin to examine whether the joy they find in digital spaces is sustainable, and what personal practices, conscious or not, they have already developed to navigate their digital lives.

Young people do not experience the internet as a singular space. They move across platforms, switch between different apps for different purposes, and bring unique expectations and acts of subversions into each digital environment they inhabit. This activity explores how young people interact with the digital spaces, by asking, ‘What digital spaces do young people inhabit across a day, what actions do they do, and what does that experience feel like?’ Participants explore what spaces they occupy, how time shapes their digital lives, where they find community and belonging online, and how they create and keep digital memories.

The dominant narrative around young people and digital life tends to centre on harms such as misinformation, addiction, and distraction. While these concerns are important, they offer an incomplete picture of young people’s digital lives and experiences. Young people also experience meaningful, empowering, and joyful engagements online, through connection, creativity, cultural expression, and the claiming of agency in digital spaces. This activity shifts the lens to explore how we can actively foster human flourishing in the digital by inviting young people to map and articulate their diverse digital joys: where they find them, what makes them feel meaningful, and whether they last. This activity explores: What diverse joys do young people experience in their digital lives? Which digital spaces are playgrounds where new forms of joyful experience are created? And how do young people experience togetherness and community online?

Young people access and experience digital tools in diverse ways depending on their context, relationships, and life circumstances. This activity is designed to surface these differences by inviting participants to reflect on everyday moments where technology shapes their lives. Participants are encouraged to draw on concrete experiences across areas like health, education, relationships and finance to examine what those experiences reveal about how digital tools are working for them and where they fall short. This activity explores: What are the conditions under which young people access digital tools in their everyday lives, and what factors shape their digital use?