Dreams, desires and the digital world: Developing critical data literacy in teens

Today’s teenagers are in a unique position in history. Born into the information age, they have known no other reality than one mediated by data-driven systems—systems that monitor, predict and influence their behavior.

However, online interactions rarely fulfill teens’ real social needs, leaving them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation through their personal data. Teens can benefit from guidance on navigating the complexities of the data economy and should be taught to think critically while engaging online.

Simon Fraser University professor William Odom’s Homeware Lab, based in SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), explores the design of new Internet of Things technologies and objects. Their “slow technology” projects are thoughtful and playful, challenging the current digital economy by suggesting alternative perspectives on life and environments through interpretation, reflection and social connection.

The team is conducting research to better understand how teenagers use technology and to promote data literacy. By partnering with high school teachers and students in safe, creative, and non-judgmental environments, they are creating opportunities for teens to explore the role of technology in their lives.

Metaphor Workbooks

Through long-term collaboration with fellow SFU professors Gillian Russell and Frédérik Lesage of the Imaginative Methods Lab, and Burnaby School District teacher Matt DeSimone, they developed the Metaphor Workbook—a classroom intervention that engages Grade 9 students in critical and reflexive thinking about their smartphones and data through creative, metaphor-driven activities.

Odom and his multidisciplinary collaborators are at the forefront of applying creative design practice and methods to explore what kinds of technological futures we want (and don’t want). Their work aims to use design as form of inquiry to prepare people to ask critical questions about data, like how it is collected and used, who it benefits, and how digital process might be redirected and reimagined.

Image source: Metaphor Workbook is viewable here /Homeware Lab & Imaginative Methods Lab


PhD students Samuel Barnett and Samein Shamsher, worked with three classes of Grade 9’s over a week, identifying gaps in teens’ understanding of the data economy and the need for critical data literacy interventions. This work revealed the complex emotional relationships teens have with their phones, and the pervasiveness of technology addiction narratives.

Their paper, “Teenagers and the Data Economy: Understanding Their Dreams, Desires and Anxieties with Metaphor Workbooks,” earned the best paper award at the Designing Interactive Systems conference this summer.

We spoke to Professor Odom and his team about their research.

Can you describe the work of the Homeware Lab?

Homeware Lab is a multidisciplinary research and design team reimagining how technology lives with us in everyday life. We develop innovative research and design strategies that make technological objects more valued and enduring—things that evolve over time.

Rather than merely solving problems, our designs create new opportunities, encouraging alternative perspectives on life and our environments through interpretation, reflection, noticing and social connection.

Combining design, human–computer interaction, computer science, digital fabrication and theories and methods from the social sciences and humanities, a key goal of our work is to question the normative, often narrow values driving digital consumerism and create possibilities for richer, more inclusive and just sociotechnical futures.

In addition to traditional modes of knowledge distribution, like research articles and lectures, we develop alternative research outcomes so our work can reach broader audiences—things like tutorials, zines, short films, and the Metaphor Workbooks.

How does the Metaphor Workbook serve as a discussion tool? Is the Workbook available for classroom use?

Framing this work in the context of metaphors provides a gateway into Grade 9 and 10 English classrooms. We use the data economy as the context through which the students learn about metaphor as a rhetorical device, but also about how metaphors serve as mental models that help us understand and engage with the world.

Through questioning these metaphors, and developing their own, teenagers are critically engaged in rethinking the invisible systems that shape their everyday lives.

Developing lesson plans and making the Metaphor Workbook accessible and adaptable is a priority, and we are collaborating with educators to do so. We also presented this work with high school teacher Matt DeSimone at the Spring professional development day for the Burnaby School District.

Tell us about some of the gaps you found in teens’ understanding of the digital economy.

Students are taught how to protect themselves in online spaces from cyberbullying and from the harm that could occur should they post inappropriate or personal content online.

There is also an extended focus on identifying biased or fake information through the teaching of simplified forms of journalistic practices including checking sources and reading laterally. While these skills are practical, current resources remain underdeveloped with regards to supporting teenagers’ agency and social identity within the data economy and lack meaningful integration into curriculum.

What are your recommendations for helping teens learn critical data literacy?

We have found that creative practices are powerful entry points for developing critical data literacies. In our classroom interventions, activities such as storytelling, charcoal sketching, collage, and mask-making invite teenagers to externalize their entanglements with the data economy and reflect on their emotional and social relationships with technology.

Rather than teaching digital safety or technical skills, these creative forms of thinking-through-making empower students to question how data circulates in their lives, how it shapes identity and agency, and how prevailing metaphors of technology might be reimagined.

Some teens—and adults too—report an attachment or addiction to their phones. People are happy to engage with positive content, feel sad when faced with disturbing content, feel guilty for engaging in “doom-scrolling.” Is there way to approach or cope with these conflicting feelings?

Many of the teenagers we worked with expressed their relationships with their phones through the language of addiction—describing themselves as “controlled,” “hypnotized,” or “trapped.” Yet, as our analysis showed, this language often echoed a broader addiction narrative that circulates through media, education, and parental discourse, rather than emerging solely from their lived experiences. Teens often seemed to have an externalized voice—a kind of moral authority—speaking through them stating that their phone use was bad.

One of our key challenges, and priorities for ongoing work, is to tease apart what teenagers genuinely think and feel about their devices from what they have been told to think, or what they believe adults and researchers expect them to say. Their creative work—collages, metaphors, and written reflections—often revealed more nuanced emotional entanglements than their explicit statements did: affection, comfort, dependency, curiosity, and shame coexisted.

Rather than framing this tension as something to “fix,” we see value in creating spaces—through art, metaphor, and reflection—where teenagers can explore these contradictions without judgment. Coping, in this sense, involves cultivating critical awareness rather than guilt: understanding how design, data, and social expectations shape one’s feelings toward technology, while making room to articulate and even celebrate the more complex, ambivalent ways that phones are woven into everyday life.

Tell us more about the other interesting projects the Homeware Lab is working on.

Capra is a new kind of hiking technology that enables hikers to re-visit time lapses of their adventure through different lenses of: time, color, and altitude. In doing so, it aims to reimagine outdoor technologies as resources for fostering deeper relations among people, place, and ecological systems. Designing technology that emphasizes reflection and long-term relationships over speed, efficiency is also central to our practice.

We create “slow technologies” that inspire people to engage deeply, think critically, and build meaningful connections with the objects they interact with and the world around them. Examples include Olo Radio, which offers a personalized journey through one’s music archive, and the Chronoscope, which provides a unique way to explore digital photo archives—both inviting travel in and across time and the evolving life stories bound up in our personal data.
 

For more, visit:

• The Homeware Lab
• William Odom’s faculty web page
• The Imaginative Methods Lab
• William Odom’s Research Expertise Engine profile
  
  

This research was generously supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada PhD fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Research Creation) funding, National Sciences and Engineering Research Council funding, and funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.