Research

Find out more about our interdisciplinary research on the digital good from the Digital Good Research Fund, our management team, postdocs, PhD students, and our interns and fellows. These projects will all feed into the Digital Good Index, to be used to evaluate digital innovations to ensure good societal outcomes.

Year

Cooperativa digital: Creating a community-run mobile app in Brazil

While most digital platforms are controlled by private for-profit companies, some digital platforms like Wikipedia are controlled by their contributing members. These types of digital platforms are part of a longstanding organisational approach called commons, specifically platform commons.

‘Cooperativa digital’ builds on a digital platform created by a Brazilian social enterprise that takes advantage of a local law that allows people to donate a portion of sales tax (i.e. VAT) to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As a platform, the mobile app matches donors with NGOs. Now that the app is operational, the social enterprise wants to transfer control to the NGOs. To support this process, the partners are translating and transforming relevant concepts from commons scholarship into methods and tools that can be used in studio experiments with the community to create the rules for this platform commons.

The project asks: How can we transform commons scholarship into usable tools that support this community to create a digital platform commons? How does the community’s approach to discussing and creating greater equity inform understanding of the digital good?

Team

Dr Rosendy Fernandez Galabo, Research Associate, Lancaster University

Professor Carlos de Salles Soares Neto, Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA), Brazil, Associate Professor

Justin Sacks, Research Associate – #Commonize Studio, Lancaster University

Professor Paul Coulton, Professor in Speculative & Game Design, Lancaster University

Jovemar Junior, Director of Reapp, Publicidade Jove.

Dr Li-Chang Shuen, PhD candidate, Federal University of Maranhão

Marcella Abreu, Master’s in design student, Federal University of Maranhão

André Gabriel Gomes, Computer Science BSc student, Federal University of Maranhão

Digital health: the digital good in low-resource settings in Africa

Access to quality healthcare remains a major problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Digital technology can overcome barriers by bridging distance, saving costs and connecting people at the right time, to the right health workers when care is needed. This can be viewed as Digital Good, but it can also create ethical dilemmas for healthcare workers, decision-makers and communities who want affordable services without compromising quality or losing control over health data. This project will examine the case study of remote consulting using mobile phones in low-resource settings of sub-Saharan Africa.

For impoverished, vulnerable communities remote consulting facilitates care delivery, however, structural and social vulnerabilities, tensions between national and local governance systems and the power of telecommunication companies create ethical dilemmas. This project will explore ethical dilemmas with key stakeholders to develop a policy-focussed shared language and framework for the digital good in healthcare in low-resource settings.

Team

Dr Bronwyn Harris, Associate Professor in Public Health, University of Warwick

Golden Lwando Mwinsa, PhD Student, Social Science and Systems in Health Unit (SSSU), Division of Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School- University of Warwick.

Campion Zharima, PhD student, Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa.

Dr Funke Fayehun, Associate Professor And Head of Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Professor Jane Goudge, Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa

Professor Senga Pemba, Professor of Medical Education, St Francis University College of Heath and Allied Sciences, Ifakara Tanzania

Dr Violet Naanyu, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Moi University, Kenya

Professor Frances Griffiths, Professor of Medicine in Society, University of Warwick

Digital mattering: A philosophical anthropology of mobile messaging as everyday human goodness

This work reframes the question of what is a ‘good’ digital society to consider how goodness may start from small building blocks of everyday, mundane communication between individuals and their friends/family. These can be framed as the foundation of belonging; creating a sense of digital ‘mattering’ to others.

This is important as strong social connectedness is noted as the bedrock of communities which demonstrate resilience in the face of crises or adverse circumstances. This project will collect empirical data on mobile device messaging (as ubiquitous and ever-present in daily life) as acts of human caring, which will then prompt creative design responses to explore further possibilities to facilitate and scaffold ‘mattering’. Collectively these materials will provide provocations for discussion of philosophical anthropology during a series of international workshops exploring the concepts of human ‘goodness’, its significance, and its potential in the design of technologies in a digital age.

Team

Dr Effie Le Moignan, Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University

Dr Christian Early, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Interim Director – Ethical Reasoning in Action, James Madison University

Professor David Kirk, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Director of Open Lab and Centre for Digital Citizens, Newcastle University

Examining the role of mobile phones in people’s relationships with themselves and with others

Team: Professor Abigail Millings and Dr Danielle Paddock

silhouette of a head and a figure with line chart, map, digital drives and connection lines

This project aims to understand how digital technology, specifically mobile phone use, influences people’s relationships with themselves and with intimate romantic partners.

Whether this impact is positive or negative is not known as the current research literature is mixed. For instance, a lot of research in the cyberpsychology discipline focuses on examining the digital harm on individuals and relationships instead of the digital good – such as Kross et al., 2002 which found that mobile phone use is associated with negative wellbeing; and Wang et al., 2017 which identified less relationship satisfaction among romantic partners of mobile phone users.

That said, there is also research to suggest digital technology can have a positive impact on wellbeing by reducing anxiety (Cauberghe et al., 2021), and can act as an enabler among romantic partners (Gabbiadina et al., 2020).

Therefore, within this project we want to understand what factors may enhance the relationship between digital technology use and individual and relational wellbeing, and also identify potential harms.

We will collect data at three timepoints across a one-year period and daily for one week, through distributing a survey of psychological measures to examine mobile phone use, relationship quality, wellbeing, and individual characteristics. We will also adopt a qualitative approach to provide an in-depth exploration around mobile phone use and romantic relationships with individuals that are largely underrepresented within psychological research (e.g., ethnic minority individuals, non-digital natives and people from lower socio-economic status backgrounds). By doing this, the findings will help to address some of the questions about how digital technology affects us, both for good, for bad and/or for both, over time, and ensuring perspectives around mobile phone use and romantic relationships are represented.

Team

Dr Danielle Paddock

Postdoctoral Researcher, Digital Good Network

and Research Associate, Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology (CeBSAP), Sheffield Hallam University

Danielle is a cyberpsychologist and her research adopts a mixed methods approach. Her research interests are in adolescent development, wellbeing, and mental health in the digital age, with a particular interest in body image and social media. She is also interested in developing, delivering and evaluating educational programmes and digital interventions to tackle these topics.

Professor Abigail Millings

Professor of Applied Social Psychology

Centre for Behavioural Science and Applied Psychology (CeBSAP), Sheffield Hallam University

Abigail uses attachment theory and behavioural science to understand how to help people to have more positive relationships with others, as well as how digital technologies can be used to support well-being.

Exploring children’s attitudes towards notions of the digital good through hybrid arts practice

Understanding children’s ideas/ knowledge is crucial in shaping our collective vision and actions. Yet, in discussing our shared digital future, many children in deprived areas are invisible through their lack of home wifi access and limited means to use, often shared, technologies.

This project will host hybrid art workshops for children from a digitally marginalised cohort in Bradford to imagine and shape a possible digital future where technology use is ethical, responsible, and inclusive. Utilising interdisciplinary creative methods drawn from arts education, the project will report on these insights.

Project blog: https://digitalgoodforkids.wordpress.com/

Team

Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice, Associate Professor in Immersive Storytelling, University of Plymouth

Angus Main, Tutor in Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art and PhD student, Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London

Professor John Potter, Professor of Media in Education, Institute of Education, University College London

Professor Steve Love, Professor of User Experience Design, School of Simulation and Visualisation, Glasgow School of Art

Dr Eleanor Dare, Co-founder, X||dinary Stories

INDIGENIA: Generative AI for Indigenous futures and ‘digital good living’

New digital technologies have often been imagined to be anathema to Indigenous peoples and, even if such preconceptions are dispelled, these communities tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of access, literacy, criticality and sovereignty. The INDIGENIA project will explore digital inclusion for Indigenous peoples in the light of debate on digital wellbeing aligned to Indigenous principles.

Firstly, the project will focus on digital inclusion for Indigenous peoples by engaging Indigenous participants with the newest wave of generative AI programmes.

Secondly, the research will address digital wellbeing from an Indigenous perspective, contributing to the Digital Good Network’s aim to contextualise the digital good for different communities. It does this by exploring how Indigenous understandings of ‘good living’ (‘Tekó Porã’ in Guarani) nuance our understanding of the ‘digital good’, and, in order to do so, it uses the same generative AI programmes to encourage Indigenous participants to creatively and critically imagine Indigenous futures in the face of so much change.

Team

Professor Thea Pitman, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Leeds. (PI)

Dr Andreas Rauh, Assistant Professor in Sound and Emerging Media, Dublin City University.

Tadeu dos Santos Kaingang, artist and researcher, and Dr Sheilla Souza, leadership team and visiting professor, Indigenist Association of Maringá (ASSINDI – NGO) and Coletivo Kókir (artists’ collective).

Sebastián Gerlic, Director, Thydêwá (NGO).

Less damage done? Finding the good in defence tech

Since the Ukraine War and the increase of defence budgets across the Global West, it is increasingly untenable to exclude defence or dual use technologies from investors’ focus. Not only has warfare arrived back in the midst of Europe, the wars that are being fought across the globe increasingly rely on new digital technologies. Venture capital investors are one of the key stakeholders influencing this world.

In this project, we focus on two questions enabling venture capital investors to safeguard digital defence and dual use technologies. First, defining what is in and out of scope – which digital technologies are key and which absolutely need to be excluded for the sake of working towards a ‘digital better’ in the space. Second, we will work towards a sector-specific environmental, social, and governance investment framework. The goal is to influence defence tech investors to scrutinise their decisions with principles for a ‘digital better’ in mind.

Team

Dr Johannes Lenhard, Researcher, University of Cambridge and Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy

Signe Kossmann, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge

Professor Fiona Murray, Dean of Innovation, MIT

Hannah Leach, Co-Director, VentureESG

Susan Winterberg, Independent consultant / International Finance Corporation

Participatory and Inclusive Data Stewardship

In partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and Liverpool Civic Data Cooperative

Team: Reema Patel, Octavia Reeve, Emily Rempel

This research will build upon a lead authored report on Participatory Data Stewardship (2022), published by the Ada Lovelace Institute, to take account of and assess the impact of recent, and rapid developments in the participatory and inclusive data stewardship space.

This work will draw from two currently disparate strands of thinking (on participatory data and inclusive data), and interweave them together, encouraging the data governance ecosystem to consider what it means to steward data in inclusive and participatory ways, as well as what good looks like in this context. We will also draw from prior work undertaken on inclusive data led by the UK Statistics Authority, and by the Open Data Institute.

This project will undertake a landscape review led by the Ada Lovelace Institute, and convene an online and international community of practice (5 workshops, 1.5 hour each) that shares knowledge and expertise from participatory and inclusive data stewardship innovations, explores and anticipates the barriers to effective participatory and inclusive data stewardship innovations, and showcases best practice from across the sector. In partnership with the Liverpool Civic Data Cooperative team

It will also undertake detailed 1 hour qualitative and semi structured research interviews with leading practitioners developing participatory and inclusive data stewardship initiatives within the industry, policy and community context.

Collectively, this work will inform an evaluation and impact assessment framework (or ‘toolkit’) for technologists and policymakers, which is tested and refined using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) methodology.

Research team

Reema Patel

Policy lead at the ESRC Digital Good Network

Co-founder of the Ada Lovelace Institute, a think tank dedicated to ensuring that artificial intelligence and data technologies benefit people and society, Reema is also a specialist in the field of deliberative democracy.

Octavia Reeve

Director (Impact and Research Practice) at the Ada Lovelace Institute

Octavia’s role connects research design to strategy, project planning, external outputs, impact and evaluation, ensuring that the Institute fulfils its commitment to make data and AI work for people and society.

Emily Rempel

Public Participation Manager at the Liverpool City Region Civic Data Co-operative (CDC)

Emily’s role is to ensure that public participation, involvement and engagement is at the core of the CDC’s work, particularly given its belief that developing beneficial data technologies should happen directly alongside building better models of public stewardship of data governance and design.

Queer joy as a digital good

This project foregrounds queer joy as a practice of personal and collective resilience amidst a socio-political landscape of increasing queerphobia, arguing that queer joy in online spaces is a digital good for users, platforms and policy. In so doing, the project will centre queer users, their knowledge, and their experience.

The project will build connections with and between communities, practitioners, and policymakers to explore how digital technologies can work for people and society, including through the development of a standard that platforms and policymakers can refer to as a benchmark for their provision. The project will also bring academics, user-communities, practitioners, and policymakers together in developing critical media literacies, highlighting the role of joy as an act of resistance against oppression.

Team

Dr Lexi Webster, Deputy Director of Digital Humanities, University of Southampton

Dr Dawn Woolley, Research Fellow, Leeds Arts University

Dr Madeleine Steeds, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University College Dublin

Dr Ben Dalton, Principal Lecturer, Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University

Dr Genavee Brown, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Northumbria University

Dr Sarah Clinch, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Manchester

Dr Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow at the Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University

Re-Imagining AI with Afrofuturist speculative design

This project explores how emerging AI technologies can be used to benefit everyone, especially communities that are marginalised by/within dominant society. This means using technology for the digital good by addressing issues of inequality, exclusion, and justice. AI systems can entrench social inequalities for marginalised groups, particularly in finance, healthcare and criminal justice. This project will promote inclusive ethical practices in the development of AI systems, to increase critical awareness of their use. To achieve this, communities most affected by these systems must be involved in understanding the design and deployment of these technologies.

This project will draw on the creativity of Afrofuturism, a cultural movement reimagining and shaping the future through a ‘Black cultural lens’. It offers new ideas on how technology can be used to help marginalized communities and challenge power structures. This involves reclaiming and repurposing technology in new ways that are more equitable and inclusive.

Team

Dr Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor, University of Warwick

Dr Kavin Narasimhan, Assistant Professor, University of Warwick

Anita Shervington, Director, BLAST Fest

Juice Aleem, Media Fellow, BLAST Fest

What does a ‘good’ digital welfare state look like?

The right to access social security through the welfare state is enshrined in international human rights law. But the digitisation of welfare systems is threatening this right both through unaccountable algorithmic decision making and digitally excluded communities’ lack of access to services. Despite extensive scrutiny of these negative shifts there has been little examination of what a ‘good’ digitised welfare system might look like, even in Nordic countries where citizen-state relations are premised on a generous welfare state.

This project brings together UK and Scandinavian experts on the digital welfare state from computing, ICT for Development, information systems, and human rights, together with community groups in the UK to capture the values underlying existing provision, and propose new frameworks for ‘good’ digital welfare.

Team

Dr Becky Faith, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre.

Dr Miranda Kajtazi, Associate Professor, Department of Informatics, Lund University School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Sweden

Professor Øystein Sæbø, Professor of Information Systems, University of Agder, Norway

Professor Sara Hoffman, Chair of Information Systems and Information Management, Department of Information Systems, University of Agder, Norway

Dr Cathy Urquhart, Visiting Professor, Department of Informatics, Lund University and Professor Emeritus, Metropolitan University Business School

Kevin Hernandez, Research Officer, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre

Research

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