Dissertation Title: Designing technologies that empower young people in "BEING. CREATIVE. TOGETHER."

Abstract:
In this dissertation, we explore new paradigms for designing digital learning platforms and spaces that are consciously centered on helping young people feel calm, creative, and authentically connected with one another—rather than anxious, disengaged, and disconnected.

As a core part of this research, we’ve developed CoCo (coco.build)—a general-purpose “co-creative” learning platform for children and teens to engage in a wide variety of safe, shared creative experiences with their peers in real-time. While learning and creativity have long been recognized as inherently social processes, existing digital tools are predominantly designed for learners to work on their own projects in isolation. Through this work, we introduce a new co-creative paradigm for real-time collaboration that is extensible to a diverse range of expressive environments such as graphical and text-based coding, digital art, writing, and others. Furthermore, we describe how we have envisioned and developed CoCo as a “self-less” social platform that de-emphasizes the comparison-based, self-centric paradigm (of profiles, likes, and followers) dominant in existing online platforms for young people.

We anchor the space of these diverse interconnected ideas through a unifying theme of “Being. Creative. Together.” We believe the timeless values of beingness, creativeness, and togetherness have become especially timely now, in an era where AI-powered tools can further accentuate the individualistic learning approaches. We supplement the broader design, technical, pedagogical, and practical contributions of this work by sharing insights, observations, and feedback from pilots with over 2,000 young people and educators across diverse contexts. Ultimately, we hope this work contributes valuable perspectives on how we can design learning technologies that empower young people to explore new ways of co-imagining, co-creating, co-learning, co-existing, and co-evolving—with and through one another.

Note: Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal have jointly conceived and developed all the ideas and work shared in this dissertation.

Committee members:
Mitch Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, MIT Media Lab
Sep Kamvar, Computer Scientist | Previously, Director of Social Computing group, MIT Media Lab
Ge Wang, Associate Professor, Department of Music (and Computer Science, by Courtesy), Stanford University