A new project will be launched to examine the ways in which digital well-being is currently framed as a user responsibility and will explore how we can all live better online.
The £300,000 ‘Control Shift Escape’ project, funded through the AHRC Catalyst Award, is led by Dr Niall Docherty, Lecturer in Data, AI and Society in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication.
The project will be split into three work packages - ‘Control’, ‘Shift’ and ‘Escape’. ‘Control’ will look at how digital well-being is framed in current discourse, in both academic research and the public media. This will include collaboration with a commissioned illustrator to display the current thinking in diagram form.
‘Shift’ will produce new concepts, measurements and designs with which to study digital well-being in its socio-technical context, rather than as an issue which is solely the responsibility of end users. This will involve synthesising previously separate philosophies of technology and wellbeing to create new, combined conceptualisations which don’t repeat the existing, politicised narratives around the subject.
The team will also bring together new networks of interdisciplinary scholars to develop innovative ways of researching in this area going forward. A collaborative workshop will be held with colleagues from human-computer-interaction, computer science and psychology to test and refine these newly synthesised ideas.
‘Escape’, co-led by Dr David Young, Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at King’s College London, will engage with public audiences through collaboration with Bloc Projects, a Sheffield-based social and arts charity led by curator Dr Sunshine Wong. The team will commission an early career artist to create a free public exhibition and events programme, to run for six weeks in Spring 2027 in Bloc’s gallery space and online.
The exhibition will offer fresh ideas and practices of digital well-being for people to explore in an accessible way. Going beyond simply showing the results of the research, the artistic collaborations will aim to provoke thoughts about a possible ‘way out’ of the current ideas around digital well-being for everyday people.
Dr Docherty said: “It is common to think that we must control our engagements with technology, or be controlled by them. This is the case for how we imagine digital well-being, which is often reduced to controlling personal technological habits. We must resist addictive designs, manage the psychological risks of social media, and balance the attentive drain of always-available work and social cultures.
“While habits are important, this focuses our attention onto the individual and away from the other factors that contribute to digital wellbeing today. This project will shed new light on these factors, exploring how digital wellbeing exists in relation to exploitative technological designs, existing sociopolitical infrastructures, regimes of data extraction, and inequalities.
“In doing so, it will critique whether ‘control’ is an appropriate model for digital wellbeing, and, more importantly, imagine new ways to study and experience digital wellbeing beyond its current form.”
This work is a continuation of Dr Docherty’s long-standing research interest in the responsibilisation of digital wellbeing in a neoliberal society, including his 2025 book Healthy Users, which was discussed in detail here.