Designing for Caring and Care-full Online Communities that Include Youth

The ‘Design for Caring and Care-full Online Communities’ is a research initiative within the Made With Play lab that focuses on exploring ways that we can design online technologies and games to support caring and inclusive environments. The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase of people participating, socializing, and learning through online platforms and technologies. Platforms that support online communities can be designed to incentivize prosocial behavior, reflection and empathy for example, through their community governance structures, moderation practices, and codes of conduct. Technologies, such as conversational agents and chat bots, can also be used to create opportunities for reflection and to support prosocial attitudes. The ‘design for Caring and Care-full Online Communities” initiative seeks to explore the many uncertainties about how to translate research into design practice through applied projects linking theory with practice.
The design for care-full online communities symposium describes five different projects from within the Made with Play lab at the University of California, Irvine. First, an overview of prosocial theories and how they can be thought about within the context of design is covered, which is followed by different examples of ways platforms could encourage caring behaviors. These examples describe the applied experiences of linking theory and practice and highlight the design of two different types of conversational agents and a prosocial discord community. In each of these examples potential suggestions for designing towards prosocial behaviors and connected learning opportunities will be surfaced.