The Challenge

Social media has unlocked a universe of new opportunities for expression, connection, sharing, listening, learning, and enjoying. But for kids, especially tweens in their most formative years, social media use can take a tremendous toll on their emotional wellbeing. These platforms, optimized for addiction and profit, are not designed specifically for the needs of children and in doing so, often result in feelings of alienation, erosion of self-confidence, and breeding of toxicity and abuse. 

Design Process

We are taking a human-centered approach, working with children, families, and community partners to co-create Clover. 

Phase 1: We aim to better understand how youth engage with social media, storytelling, and conversations through interviews and design workshops with target stakeholders (middle- and high-schoolers, families, experts, and community partners). 

Based on this work, we’ve defined our design challenge as: How might we design a pro-social media space that is explicitly scaffolded to nurture positive identity development and self-confidence during our most formative and vulnerable teen years?

Phase 2: We will run an iterative co-design process to inform an initial platform design and core experiences that are grounded in kids’ wants, needs, and behavior, before moving into a more intensive software development and pilot deployment phase.

Where We Are Now

From this challenge, we imagined many different prototype concepts for Clover, and then identified a design palette of underserved needs to deliver on, principles to carry through concepts, and features for consideration. We then distilled our wild prototype ideas into three distinct concepts that meet the needs, principles, and features of our design palette.

In the Spring, we will share and gather feedback on these design concepts with a group of youth and co-design a prototype. We’ll then build a functional first iteration to test as part of a future pilot!

The Clover Team

Anneli Woolf, Juliana Nazaré, Perris Richter, Sarah Ballinger, Taylor Fang, and Artemisia Luk

Contact Us

For more information or to get in touch with us, please contact clover@media.mit.edu.