Introduction

It was July of 2021 and we had gathered teens over Zoom for a series of co-design sessions. Our aim: to build a “by teens, for teens” toolkit to support digital wellbeing. We started with a provocation intended to surface the ways social media can support and detract from wellbeing. The teens populated an online mural with post-its about how social media helps them feel connected, seen, or inspired, on the one hand, and stressed, anxious, or insecure on the other. We stood back to reflect. One teen noticed a throughline across the post-its. She named it, “The culture of needing to be productive all the time and needing to be working all the time and, like, the grind.” To be sure, the grind played out differently for teens based on their identities and contexts. But the concept of the grind and the feeling that “it’s so damaging” had immediate resonance across the group.

The grind powerfully captures an important dimension of many teens’ experiences today. Technology plays a crucial role – specifically, social media can speed up the gears of grinds teens often feel. But, as we describe in this essay, training our attention to tech as the only source of their grinds misses the mark. Starting with what’s hard for a particular teen, rather than just how tech is hard, is a worthwhile shift. Zooming in to the very particular roles tech plays in teens’ experiences and then zooming out to see the fuller picture is a necessary pivot if we want to build interventions that are actually helpful. Widening our lens in this way helps avoid giving too much or too little credit to tech design, as we interrogate it alongside the details of youth’s engagement and their intersectional identities and contexts. In this way, this approach supports attention to the ways tech can amplify or mitigate equity issues.

Our process of identifying the grind and designing interventions to support youth in managing their grinds highlights two critical dimensions of our work: (1) tuning into the specifics of individual youth’s experiences, identities, and contexts, and (2) designing interventions to support meaningful experiences with and related to technology.

In this essay, we describe two case studies that illustrate our approach to both dimensions. Importantly, the two cases illustrate two different, but complementary, directions for interventions to support human thriving: one that is person-focused (learning experiences that equip teens with skills), and one that is tech design-focused (an app that supports intentional use of other apps).

Context

Understanding adolescents’ experiences in today’s world requires looking beyond broad population trends and toward interactions among individual youth in context, and the design of the technologies they use and how they use them. Researchers have moved from limited attention to screen time toward fine-grained studies of how youths’ relationships with tech are shaped by their different identities, strengths, vulnerabilities, and contexts (Beyens et al. 2020a, 2020b; Ito, Odgers and Schueller 2021; Odgers and Jensen 2020; Orben et al. 2022; Valkenberg and Peter 2013).

Attention to the particular stresses borne by youth from minoritized communities is also growing. Researchers have documented the ways in which exposure to racism, including racialized violence, on social media creates trauma for Black youth (Tanksley 2019, 2020). Social media algorithms have also been shown to reinforce race- and class-based marginalization by making certain voices more visible than others (Kennedy 2020). At the same time, studies point to ways in which minoritized youth create supports for wellbeing, even “spaces of refuge” and joy online (Ito et al. 2020; Lu and Steele 2019; Tanksley 2019, 2020). Similarly, studies document online abuse toward LGBTQ+ youth (Abreu and Kenny 2018). Yet, research also shows how social media are leveraged by queer youth as beneficial spaces for identity affirmation, emotional support, and identity-specific information (Craig et al. 2021). Effectively supporting youth wellbeing in a connected age requires alertness to these complexities.

Methods

Design research has a rich tradition of involving youth directly in the design of technology and related interventions. The case studies described here illustrate how such approaches can deepen understanding of youths’ individual experiences with technology and identify new directions for tech design and interventions that are supportive of youth wellbeing.

Participatory approaches are committed to bringing key stakeholders into research (McIntyre 2000), evaluation (Zeldin et al. 2012), and design (Bell and Davis 2016; Yip et al. 2012). Participatory design (PD) approaches are especially relevant. In PD, “design is research” (Spinuzzi 2005).

These methods involve youth directly in the design process in roles that range from user to tester to design partner in shared decision-making roles alongside adults (Hart 1992; Iversen et al. 2017). The promises of PD lie in authentically incorporating youths' perspectives, values, and experiences across the process. Engaging minoritized youth is especially important given the distinct challenges they experience and positive opportunities they tap in a networked world (Literat and Brough 2019). In foregrounding the fuller experience of users, a participatory approach represents an intentional pivot away from designing for (a) the “imagined average user” (Lenhart and Owens 2021) and/or (b) user engagement as the principal aim.

Both case studies were part of larger research projects that began with methods other than participatory design – specifically, surveys, focus groups, experience sampling, and interviews. As social scientists trained in developmental science and sociology, these methods are our stock-in-trade, and they proved to be valuable entry points for surfacing insights. But co-design methods (the stock-in-trade of HCI researchers) called to us – especially given our motivation to build supports targeted to youths’ actual pain points. We were especially drawn to the potential of cooperative inquiry (Druin 2002), equitable practices (Yip et al. 2017), and the principle of positioning youth as experts on their own experiences.

Cases

Case 1: Pressures as “A Grind”

Case 1 comes from a project led by Weinstein and James (2022)focused on youth wellbeing in a connected world. We turned to PD methods after conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews to identify teens’ tech-relevant pain points. Our research team had recently completed a study that surfaced different tech-related struggles among adolescents. We examined survey data from more than 3,500 U.S.-based youth and co-analyzed insights with a teen advisory group of 22 teens who helped contextualize worries like risks to private information and feeling overly dependent on one’s phone (Weinstein and James 2022).

The data were a compelling call to action. As we mapped teens’ struggles, we saw clearly that what's hard about tech and why differs for different teens. Echoing findings from Weinstein’s prior studies (Weinstein 2018; Weinstein et al. 2021), we observed that tech-linked challenges coexist with upsides, particularly for youth who find support, positive engagement, and validation online. The impulse for PD work was to engage teens directly to better understand their mental models of digital wellbeing and to co-develop interventions that went beyond a simple focus on limiting screen time to supports that meet the complexity of their connected lives.

We had worked closely with our teen advisory group for several months, establishing rapport and thinking together about survey findings on tech-related topics. This felt like a golden opportunity, especially as the teens came away from the co-interpretation phase with reflections like: “I used to think that no one had a problem with social media and that everyone just saw it as like this perfect thing. Now I know that, [other teens] realize that it has problems with it. They just don't want to talk about it because nobody's talking about it.” How, we wondered, would they design an intervention to help teens “talk about” tech in ways that reveal shared challenges and surface helpful strategies?

Six of the teens participated in a co-design group with the broad aim of creating a “by teens, for teens” digital wellbeing resource. The participants were ages of 15-19 and comprised a diverse group with respect to particular identities: Three identified as people of color, three as white, four as female, two as male, and two as LGBTQ+. We did not collect any formal information related to socio-economic (SES) status; however, information shared during sessions indicated SES diversity across the group. Our research team included one black man and four white women, one of whom identifies as LGBTQ+. We spanned ages 21-51.

Our first co-design session featured a series of provocations intended to surface diverse ways tech can support and/or detract from wellbeing. We shared an online Mural with different descriptors that emerged from our survey research (connected, seen/valued, inspired, in control, stressed, anxious, insecure, competitive, out of control) as well as space for teens to name further emotions by anonymously adding post-its to the Mural.

When we stood back to reflect, one teen called out a throughline theme across the post-its. She called it “The culture of needing to be productive all the time and, like, needing to be working all the time and, like, the grind.” This language was quickly taken up by others in the group. The conversation touched on a variety of themes - including social comparison, influencer culture, distraction, and the pull of TikTok – but there was a natural energy and resonance around the idea of “the grind” and the sense that “it’s so damaging.”

Before the next co-design session with teens, our research team met - without the teens - to discuss next steps. While we had brainstormed a variety of possible prompts, we were also committed to improvisation (Lee et al. 2021). We were inclined to follow teens’ energy and our piqued curiosity: we wanted to understand more about the grind and how it played out. What were their mental models of the term, and their lived experiences with it?

One team member, a graphic artist, created a design invitation to visually represent a grind (a version of the image in Fig. 11.1, with blank “gears”). We added it to Mural, and created personal copies for each teen to annotate. In the next session, we invited everyone to build on their contributions from the prior session by populating the gears. We asked: “What is your grind? In what ways do you hustle or feel like you should hustle?”

Their reflections (see Fig 11.2) echoed a number of themes already present in the literature, such as stresses related to activism, body image, and reputation. But it was a revelation to hear that teens saw these as grinds: areas where they feel a kind of looming pressure to always do more, keep up, and to signal or perform their success. Across 48 different gears teens annotated during the session, we saw key sources of variation based on their different identities. One teen reflected, “being an immigrant sort of forces a grind on me. It’s either my parents [or] the expectations i have set with others”; another wrote about a grind related to the “right way to be gay - assumptions about the way I dress and present.” Participants’ individual grinds reflected how their intersectional identities shape the pressures they feel, online and off. At the same time, we also identified recurring categories of pressures.

Diverse grinds

Our research team reviewed the gears through close open coding, and looked across the data with a thematic analytic approach informed by reflexive methods (Braun and Clarke 2021) (Figure 10.1). Through this process, we distilled the original 48 responses into categories based on recurring themes.

First, we saw evidence of a “Game Plan” Grind: to have a set plan for one’s life, future, and career. Teens described, “overwhelming pressure from school and your future career, needing to have everything figured out” and “constantly needing to prove that I have an important plan for my life.” They named pressures to “get perfect grades, get into a top college, have a life/career plan” and to “Know what you want to do / be in the future and begin working towards that (internships, etc.).” From the discussion that followed, we heard from teens how seeing successful influencers and peers online can amplify the inclination to have a set vision and plan.

A related but distinct grind is the Achievement Grind. Whereas the Game Plan Grind reflects a future orientation, the Achievement Grind is focused on present success. It is wrapped up with external markers (e.g., grades, test scores) and a need to keep up, yet also stand out:“Pressure to be the best in all aspects of life”; “be as successful as others my age (fame, athletics, politics)”; “Pressure to do the most and spread myself thin”; and “Have the most impressive grades, extracurriculars, internships, make sure everyone knows I am a capable human being.” The Achievement Grind has a constancy to it (“Feeling like I can’t take breaks if I want to succeed”), and means eschewing relaxation in favor of productivity (“Social media often over glorifies overworking thus pushing the narrative that we as young people have to hustle harder than a simple 9-5 basically we have to have a job while look like we dont sweat and own a lash business and be pretty and popular. Relaxing is often looked down upon thus causes this panicking feeling to always be on “my grind” so I’m not caught “slacking.”). Social media posts can amplify these pressures: “On TikTok people doing their stats, scores (I don’t know if I got a bad score how I would be able to go on TikTok). On Snapchat everyone is out [socializing]… It’s the worst of all worlds. Makes me feel like I’m not doing enough, but doing too much at other times.”

The idea that “On Snapchat everyone is out [socializing]” connects to a Social Grind. The social grind comes through as pressure to “Be social/partying/ hanging out with friends all the time” and to “prioritize social life over everything including mental health (recently started prioritizing mental health and saying no to plans, but then seeing people post and pressure to go, make a post, and show people that you were there.)” It involves pressure to be socializing regularly, to have many friends, but also to showcase that those friendships are high quality. One teen described “Making sure that I’m posting with a variety of people to signal that I have a lot of friends (who gets tagged/untagged, who is represented too much in my pictures),” while another shared “Feeling like I need to present my relationship as the best.” The social grind also connects to a broader pressure to “Demonstrate that I am happy and loving life and that no one needs to worry about me.”

The Appearance Grind, focused on “body/fitness” or, more specifically the sense that one needs to “Prioritize green smoothies, low carb recipes, and high intensity workouts for a snatched waist.” and to“Look my best at all times (outfits, makeup, body).” For some, it’s “clothes and making sure I’m looking my best, favorite jewelry”; for others, a general “Pressure to do this all [i.e., the other grinds] while looking good.” To be sure, teens’ narratives around these grinds made clear that social media trends and workout videos amplify the appearance grind, as does the culture of constant documentation and the related need to be camera-ready anytime. We also saw some evidence of a Self-Improvement Grind, which involves working out but also “Keeping up with all my interests,” and even becoming more “spiritual” and focused on “enlightenment”; again, teens described how social media trends like Spiritual TikTok can amplify these pressures.

Teens described a grind not only to look good, but also to be good. The Activism Grind reflects a pressure to contribute to“Net good: environmental/social,” “planet good,” and “[to] consistently stay informed and outspoken (in the most left leaning way possible) about social issues.” The Activism Grind certainly has a positive component - but it can be a grind when negative feelings and pressures accompany it. “Social media makes me feel sometimes powerless,” one teen wrote, “because of the urge I have to fix everyone and everything and I have to learn and understand that I can’t.” This grind echoed a theme in our prior research: some teens feel tremendous pressure around civic speech on social media - amplified by a sense that silence is seen by peers as taking sides, yet speaking up creates countless ways to get it wrong or come across as performative (Weinstein and James 2022).

One final grind we identified, a Reputation Grind, involves the ways others view one’s identity. It includes “Pressure to be funny, to display certain inside jokes, come up with new stuff to make people laugh and them engaged with what I’m posting (not just parties, drop a menu from a taco bell)” or to “Curate my own quirky yet mainstream social media and real life personas.” It also involves “upholding my reputation,” which has a notable digital component as self-presentations take shape online.

Figure 10.1.: Diverse grinds: Exploring pressures teens feel

Building directly on these insights, our team created an intervention resource for classrooms and after school contexts that leverages the Grind concept. The resource invites youth to explore the positives and challenges of tech in their lives (What’s happening?), name their Grinds (What’s hard?), and identify and share strategies for supporting their wellbeing (What helps?). This activity sequence can be folded into existing evidence-based interventions such as SEL lessons, peer mentorship programs, or mental health clinician-led groups. The activities are designed to support attention to the often subtle ways that tech dynamics connect to wellbeing. The Grind offers an example of an intervention focused on supporting youth to engage digitally their wellbeing in mind. In Case 2, we explore efforts to design new digital experiences that center human wellbeing.

Case 2: Meaningful experiences

Case 2 comes from a study investigating teens’ experiences with networked technologies during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States (see Pitt et al. 2021). We used experience sampling and in-depth interviews to document the experiences of 21 teens (aged 14-19) living in Seattle, Washington over a five-month period between April and August 2020.

Our experience sampling methods consisted of short (two-minute) surveys sent to teens’ phones three times per week for ten weeks. These surveys asked participants about the technologies they were using at that moment (including what they were doing and how they felt about it) and their current mood (e.g., on a scale from 0 = very negative to 100 = very positive, how are you feeling right now?). At the end of the ten weeks, we interviewed each teen about their pandemic- and technology-related experiences, and invited them to reflect on visualizations of their survey responses (e.g., a graph of their changing mood over time).

Our analysis revealed that total time teens spent on their digital devices and with social media on one day had no relationship to how positive or negative they felt the next day (Pitt et al. 2021). What turned out to be important was how satisfying teens felt their technology use had been. The greater the satisfaction, the better teens felt with life in general, irrespective of how much time they had spent on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.

We used follow-up interviews to dig deeper into what teens considered a satisfying digital experience, focusing on social media. Our analysis showed that a satisfying experience was one that felt meaningful. A heartfelt conversation with a friend, insight about world events, the development of new skills — teens classified these types of experiences as meaningful and time well spent.

Teens varied considerably in the extent to which they ended a TikTok or YouTube session feeling their time had been well spent. Many teens approached their technology use without direction or purpose. They described feeling like they were being led from one video or trending topic to the next rather than setting and following their own goals. They often found themselves looking up from their screens feeling “I just wasted my time.” For these teens, a low level of technology satisfaction (i.e., meaningful interactions) translated into lower levels of daily wellbeing. Intentionality, then, distinguished a meaningful social media interaction from a feeling of wasted time. Intentional interactions stood in direct contrast to “mindless” scrolling and phone checking teens described in their interviews.

These insights led us to ask: How can design support teens’ intentional social media use?

In this work we drew on participatory methods to co-design new technology experiences. We started this work by engaging a subset of nine participants (aged 14-18 years) from the empirical study to participate in two co-design sessions in which we explored design ideas that centered meaningful experiences.

For each session, we drew on our analysis of teens’ interviews and surveys to identify a focal concern related to technology and wellbeing: “mindless scrolling” and the struggle to experience genuine peer connection. Using the online collaborative tool Padlet, we led the teen co-designers through a series of idea-generation questions, which prompted them to discuss and remix each other’s ideas. In this round of design sessions, we focused primarily on ideation and initial design concepts rather than detailing specific features.

A core idea that surfaced from this work was a design mechanism that slowed teens down before they started a social media session and encouraged them to reflect on their intentions and purpose before and after a session. The research team used this insight to design an initial prototype app that supports teens’ intentional social media use. Locus is designed as a wrapper application that shapes how teens enter a social media app on their phone. It delivers app-entry prompts that encourage teens to reflect on their intentions before they start a social media session. Locus also sends general end-of-day prompts to encourage teens to reflect on their social media experiences throughout the day and set goals for the next day.

Following the initial design and development of the prototype app, we conducted a second set of co-design sessions in summer 2021 with nine teens who had not been part of the previous study. They included five male, three female, and one nonbinary youth between the ages of 14 and 18 years. Five of the youth identified as Asian and four identified as white. These sessions gave us insight into how Locus might be taken up in the context of teens’ daily lives as well as feedback on the app’s core features.

Consistent with the previous study, this group of teen co-designers expressed a desire to feel more in control of the time they spend on social media, as this teen observed: “I sometimes just end up kinda losing track and endlessly scrolling.” Notably, they believed they would feel more in control of their social media use if they approached it with greater intention, including setting goals, planning, and self-monitoring. They expressed openness to an app that helped them to engage in these behaviors.

The teen co-designers used the app prototype for one week before we reconvened to solicit their feedback on the experience. Aside from the bugs they identified (which we fixed prior to field deployments), the teens said they appreciated that the prompts encouraged them to think about their intended purpose for opening an app (app-entry prompts) and reflect more broadly on their time with social media (general end-of-day prompts). One teen participant noted: “…when I got the questions…the check in at the end of the day…it would make me think ‘Am I happy with how I used my phone today? Did I use my phone too much today?’” This quote and other similar responses suggest that the prompts helped participants to reflect on the meaning they were deriving from their social media experiences.

Based on this feedback, we did not make any major changes to the app’s core design. Instead, we worked with the teen co-designers to update the wording of the daily prompts to respond to feedback such as: “I wish this app would mix up the questions somehow so that it doesn’t feel like asking my mom for permission before using the phone.” We also tested out different frequencies of sending prompts, eventually settling on one app-entry prompt per day and one general end-of-day prompt.

The Locus app prototype and field deployments

The prototype that we finalized for broader field testing provides in-the-moment support for teens to enter a social media session with intention rather than mindlessness. When a teen opens Locus on their phone, they see all of their apps displayed together (see Figure 10.2 (A)). After the desired app is selected, a text-based reflective prompt pops up (see Figure 10.2 (B)). The teen can enter a response through text or speech recording, or they can choose to dismiss the prompt altogether and proceed to the selected app. They see one app-entry prompt per day per app. Locus also sends a general prompt in the form of a push notification once per day at 9pm (see Figure 10.2 (C)).

We conducted two exploratory field deployments (N₁ = 12; M_age=16.2 years; N₂ = 54; M_age=16.2 years) each lasting two weeks. The first study provided insight into participants’ experiences using Locus over an extended period of time and allowed us to pilot the pre- and post-deployment surveys and daily surveys in preparation for the larger second study. The second deployment allowed us to examine the acceptability and perceived effects of the intervention with a broader set of teens (30% female; 64% male; 6% nonbinary; 45% Black; 36% white; 12% Hispanic or Latine; .05% other or mixed ethnicity), including whether there were any quantifiable pre/post changes in participants’ social media experiences.

Both deployments showed that adolescents adopted Locus with minimal frustration and perceived themselves to approach their social media sessions with greater intention as a result of using the intervention. In a follow-up interview, one participant (male, age 15) reflected:

“I noticed I was actually monitoring how I was using the apps, and it was actually making me think on how I wanted to use them, and how badly I was using some of them…It seemed like I was just going on to kind of distract myself constantly, instead of wanting to see anything in particular, or going on for a goal.”

Another participant (female, age 17) similarly spoke about reflecting more on the intention behind her social media use: “I think being asked these questions, they make you reflect on, ‘Oh, why am I doing this? Why am I using this? I should be using [social media] for a better cause, or maybe, like, using it less.’”

Locus helped one participant (female, age 16) clarify the central purpose of her social media use and thereby direct her interactions with greater intention toward that purpose:

“I think I started to use social media a lot more as a communication platform rather than a way to escape boredom. Because generally, I would just use social media because it’s something entertaining for my brain to do. And I don’t have to put any thought into it. But now I use it more as a platform to see what’s going on in my friends’ lives and things that they’re doing.”

For this participant, greater intentionality translated into more meaningful interactions on social media:

“I felt like the time [using Locus] was a lot more meaningful. Like on Instagram, before I would just spend a lot of time scrolling through like random people’s posts I didn’t even know. Instead, now whenever I open the app, it would mostly be just [to interact with] the people I actually know, so it felt a lot more like meaningful.”

In addition to these qualitative insights, we used pre- and post-intervention survey results from the second field deployment to examine quantitative evidence of the intervention’s potential effectiveness. The three measures used in this analysis address aspects of a person’s intentional social media use: perceived self-control, absentmindedness, and autonomy in relation to social media. On average, participants reported increased self-control (t(52 )=5.79, p< 0.001), decreased absentmindedness (t(52 )=2.74, p<0.01), and increased autonomy (t(52)=5.12, p<0.001) in relation to their social media use from pre- to post-deployment.

These results suggest that design–especially when it is grounded in youth’s perspectives and values–can be used to reshape teens’ relationship to social media. By encouraging teens to pause and reflect before beginning a social media session and to reflect again at the end of the day, Locus helped teens approach their social media use with greater intentionality. The results lay the foundation for future work, including investigations into long-term effects and promising design directions for supporting meaningful social media experiences.

Figure 10.2.: Screenshots of the Locus app.

(A): The application landing page where users access their social media apps; (B): An app-entry prompt that appears after clicking on a social media app; (C): A general end-of-day prompt received every day at 9pm.

Discussion

Our case studies showcase the power of participatory design with youth to yield new insights and seed prototypes for resources that support young people’s wellbeing in a tech-rich world. PD techniques have been acknowledged as especially effective because they create novel opportunities for youth “to concretely express abstract ideas” (Yip et al. 2019:3). Indeed, our case studies surfaced valuable insights about the ways teens think about digital wellbeing, about their desires for meaningful connection, about felt pressures to be productive, and about the ways technology can support and complicate these human needs.

Teens' portrayals of “the grind” in Case 1 are theoretically consistent with the idea of social media as an amplifier that increases the intensity of adolescents’ developmental proclivities (Nesi, Choukas-Bradley and Prinstein 2018). The particulars of the grinds teens shared also clarify why quantitative studies point to adolescence as a window of heightened developmental sensitivity to social media (i.e., Orben et al. 2022). Today’s adolescents are navigating questions about who they are and who they want to be in a context where social media provides around-the-clock opportunities to curate self-presentation and interpret peer feedback, which is often quantified in forms like likes, comments, and shares (Davis 2023; Weinstein and James 2022). Given the ways technology can intersect with developmentally-linked “grinds” and drives, we join others in this collection (Reich et al., Radesky et al.) in urging developmental considerations as in tech design and intervention development.

And yet, technology’s role as an amplifier–and in some cases, originator–of young people’s stressors merits direct attention. Therefore, in Case 2, we explored the role of design in amplifying challenges experienced by today’s teens. We used insights from our empirical work investigating the relationship between teens’ social media use and wellbeing as a basis for participatory design work to reimagine youths’ experiences. We explored design mechanisms that would foreground intentionality and meaning while discouraging unintentional experiences like “mindless scrolling.” The Locus app that we designed and tested represents a proof-of-concept intervention to show how interaction design can be used to support, instead of undermine, youths’ wellbeing.

Together, the case findings also suggest the importance of both tech-focused and more holistic approaches to wellbeing research and design. The Locus findings show the promise of design interventions for improving teens’ interactions with their devices. And insights about teens’ “grinds” underscore the value of stepping back from technology, too: adopting a whole person approach to exploring stressors and then considering the ways social media and other technology uses are playing a role in the context of a young person’s life and wellbeing.

Following the momentum of teens in our participatory design groups facilitated a new kind of understanding that motivated a pivot in the way we think about digital wellbeing. Historically, our teams have taken an approach common in media research and intervention development: beginning with a focus on the technology. We ask questions like, “how does technology use (or a specific app like TikTok or Instagram) contribute to stress or ill-being?” And, relatedly, “what new interventions are needed to address new digital issues that threaten wellbeing?”

But our PD research helped us see the value of a different entry point: what is stressful for a particular teen right now, and how does technology play a role in those stressors? This holistic approach begins with a focus on the person and (re)positions the role of technology. It allows for a recognition that technology may amplify or instead reduce a particular stressor; or, that there may be major stressors in teens’ lives around which tech is simply not relevant. This approach aligns with calls for interventions that focus on integrating technology-relevant considerations into existing evidence-based programs and practices – rather than treating ‘internet issues’ as distinct (Finkelhor et al. 2020).

Working closely with youth is a constant reminder of relevant variation, contextual and cultural. We saw how the different identities of our design partners shaped the experiences we each drew from in the course of co-design, and the focal issues we did (and did not) raise. For example, we were grateful that we had queer youth who could speak to particular grinds linked to their queer identities – certainly not because they could speak for all queer youth, but because their perspectives alerted us to distinct ways particular grinds (e.g., the appearance grind) were experienced by some queer youth. We heard too about how the achievement grind was amplified for one teen in ways that connected to her identity as an immigrant. We grappled with, on the one hand, a deep sense of gratitude that we had meaningful diversity in our group and, on the other hand, a sensitivity to the ways a small group can push youth to feel like they have to speak for or represent a whole identity group. We worried, too, about who was not in the room and how the composition of a design team - and the research team - inevitably shapes the direction of PD work.

Conclusion

This essay makes the case for the whole person as a primary emphasis in conversations about the role of technology in our lives, and in the design of apps and devices. It urges a pivot from starting with technology to starting with diverse human needs and centering youth voice and equity as we build supports for wellbeing. The case studies in this essay reveal how such approaches to research and development can yield deep understandings of youths’ experiences of “grinds” and of what counts as a meaningful tech experience. These insights offer essential points of departure for design work, and involving youth directly as design partners levels up efforts to build relevant, effective interventions.

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