AUTHORS

Amanda Third, Manisha Pathak-Shelat, Louisa Welland, Vama Shah, Saesha Kini, Logan Culley, Linda Marsden, Girish Lala

The Young and Resilient Research Centre

Today's globalized world holds significant prospects but can be tough for young people. They face many immediate and long-term challenges, from high costs of living and debt to long term economic disadvantage, climate change and mental health difficulties. At the same time, technology is playing an increasing role in young people's lives. The Young and Resilient Research Centre, within the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, explores how to enhance young people’s resilience in the face of these challenges - and to understand the role that digital technology can play, so that young people live well and participate fully in social and economic life.

MICA

MICA - The School of Ideas is India’s premier management institute for Strategic Marketing and Communication. Established in 1991, MICA is an autonomous, non-profit education institution dedicated to creating leadership in Management. MICA strives to develop empathetic leaders and thinkers who are creative and adaptive problem-solvers, through four residential programs: Two Post Graduate Diplomas in Management, A certificate program in Crafting Creative Communication (CCC) and Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) that is equivalent to a doctoral program. This apart, MICA also conducts a host of Online Programmes, Leadership and Management Development Programmes (LMDPs), and Training Programmes and Workshops.

The Centre for Development Management and Communication

The Centre for Development Management and Communication (CDMC) at MICA is a centre of excellence that leverages MICA’s expertise in strategic communication and information and communication management to strengthen social impact programs. CDMC is committed to promoting integrated, innovative, and pragmatic solutions using the power of communication and management. CDMC aspires to create synergistic local, national, and international partnerships between academia, civil society, and corporate and government organizations for sustainable social impact.

Acknowledgements

We would like to pay thanks to the team at MICA who supported data collection in India: Sushama Oza, Kunal Pandya, and Yagna Raval. We are also deeply grateful to the schools: Sarvoday Kumarshala, Parishram Primary School and Riverside, and Kruti Desai’s coaching centre who enabled us to hear from children in India.

We would like to acknowledge the support of team members at the Young and Resilient Research Centre who supported research design, Australian data collection and analysis: Skye Tasker, Lilly Moody, Kim Lam and Lucia Barrera.

We would also like to thank the team at the SEJIWA Foundation who led data collection in Indonesia: Diena Haryana, Afriyani Rahmawati and Andika Kadir.

Our appreciation also goes out to the 127 children and young people who took part in the research workshops.

Acknowledgement of Country

The Young and Resilient Research Centre acknowledges the Burramattagal people, the Gadigal and the Bidjigal peoples and the Wiradjuri people as the traditional custodians of the land on which we carried out this research in Western Sydney, Bondi, Orange and Cowra, Australia, and pay our respect to their Elders, past, present and future.

Suggested Citation: Third, A., Pathak-Shelat, M., Welland, L., Shah, V., Kini, S., Culley, L., Marsden, L., & Lala, G. (2025). Culture-centred digital design: Foregrounding children’s and young people’s perspectives: A pilot study in Australia, India and Indonesia. Young and Resilient Research Centre, Sydney.

Executive summary

Digital technologies and the internet are playing a growing role in how children and young people understand and experience their own and other cultures in both the global South and the global North. While children and young people all over the world encounter many of the same risks and rewards of digital technologies, in the global South, the digital platforms and services children and young people commonly use are frequently designed and deployed by global North technology providers and so may not account for or accommodate important aspects of users' cultural diversity. Concomitantly, young people in the global South are faced with additional culture-specific risks of harm that their global North peers may not appreciate or confront.

Increasingly, both children and young people themselves, and the designers of the online platforms and services they use, are recognising how more inclusive digital design built to accommodate cultural diversity might improve users' experiences of and satisfaction with digital and online technologies. While that growing recognition is encouraging, there is still a lack of formal, systematic, and cross-cultural research exploring diverse children's and young people's lived experiences of online engagement viewed through a cultural lens, and little work that understands their ideas for how cultural inclusivity might be encouraged and improved online. Three key challenges present themselves in relation to these issues. Children and young people:

• Want access to culturally relevant content to enable them to maximise the benefits of a digital environment and realise their rights in the digital environment
• Want to participate in the digital world: not just as users of digital products, services and platforms, but as creators, decision-makers and citizens
• Are often excluded from research and remain unseen and unheard in digital design, particularly in the global South

Resulting from a collaboration between the Young and Resilient Research Centre in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, MICA, and The Centre for Development Management and Communication, the pilot study described in this report seeks to address these challenges by adding to the evidence base about how and why children and young people from diverse cultures engage with digital technologies, what their experiences and perceptions of such engagements are, and what ideas they have for improving digital design so it is inclusive of cultural diversity. The pilot engaged children and young people three countries (Indonesia, India, and Australia) in qualitative workshop-based activities to surface their ideas and experiences. Key findings from the pilot are as follows:

THERE ARE DIFFERENCES IN HOW DIVERSE CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE EXPRESS CULTURE

Children and young people tend to relate culture to either conceptual, tradition-related, or tangible factors with clear differences between children and young people from each country. Young participants in India describe culture in conceptual terms, those in Indonesia relate culture to traditions, and in Australia participants predominantly report tangible aspect of culture. These differing emphases and interpretations reinforce how perceptions of culture can vary by location and signal towards the role of socio-economic and political contexts in informing children's and young people's understandings.

DIGITAL MEDIA CONSUMPTION REINFORCES CULTURAL BELONGING AND IDENTITY

Differences in how children and young people understand what encompasses their culture are linked to how they conceptualise the influence of digital media on their sense of culture. Young Indians and Indonesians highlight how digital media can strengthen national and/or regional cultural norms, reinforcing ideas about what it means to be Indian and Indonesia. Young Australians' digital engagement is less about accessing and reaffirming Australian culture than about connection through entertaining exchanges with youthful peer groups that reinforces membership and belonging to an overarching youth culture.

CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE LEARN ABOUT THEIR OWN AND OTHER CULTURES THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

Regional differences in children’s and young people’s reasons for engaging with digital technologies mirror the differences in how their digital media consumption intersects with identity and belonging. In South-East Asia, learning about other countries and peoples are important functions of children's and young people's online engagement. However, young Australians seldom explicitly highlight educational or awareness-raising about cultures as a reason for digital engagement but rather focus on the entertainment value of international online content.

CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE SAY GLOBAL DIGITAL PRODUCTS CAN EXCLUDE, DISREGARD, DISRESPECT AND IGNORE DIVERSE CULTURES

Children and young people can hold dissonant views about online services and platforms. For many children and young people, the same platforms they say are made with their cultures in mind are also the platforms they say do not feel like they have been designed with their culture in mind.

CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE SAY CULTURE-CENTRED DESIGN SHOULD APPLY TO MULTIPLE AREAS

While children's and young people's experiences and perceptions of digital engagement vary, they offer keen observations about the role and value of culture-centred design if prompted. Those observations indicate the breadth and depth of young people's ideas about how the design of digital platforms and services should be improved to better account for cultural difference, and surface key youth-centred principles for designing culture-centred digital experiences:

• Safety - children and young people want them and their peers to be safe online
• Accessibility - children and young people want them and their peers to be able to access digital services and devices, where access relates to both technical/mechanics and design
• Inclusivity and Respect - children and young people want inclusivity and respect for diverse cultures to be manifested in digital design
• Cultural Awareness - children and young people highly value digital and online experiences that raise awareness and promote education about their own and other diverse cultures
• Cultural Expression - children and young people in the global South think deeply about how their cultures are presented and portrayed online
• Decolonisation - some children and young people think about the potential for digital technologies to advance broader understandings about the history and ongoing effects of colonisation
• Cultural Appropriateness - children and young people in the global South value accurate and respectful representations of their cultures, culturally appropriate online experiences, and online platforms and services that champion culturally relevant worldviews

Findings from this pilot lend insight into how digital technology use influences and shapes the cultural practices and identities of young people across India, Indonesia, and Australia. We identified important differences in the ways in which diverse children and young people express ‘culture’, discovering that their digital media consumption reinforces their own cultural belonging and identity, but also exposes them to other cultures, with both positive and negative consequences. Our findings highlight the benefits that children and young people can receive when engaging with digital technologies. Yet, the responses of the children and young people who took part also foreground how participating in a digital world, predominately designed by and for white, global North audiences, can exclude, disregard, disrespect and ignore diverse cultures. Our data show that children and young people are explicitly calling for an internet that is safe, accessible, culturally inclusive, respectful and aware - and decolonised.

Introduction

One in three new internet users is a child. While digital divides and access inequalities persist (International Telecommunications Union, 2023), children are coming online at the fastest rate in the global South (Livingstone, Carr & Byrne, 2015). These young people stand to benefit enormously from the digital environment (Third & Moody, 2021), yet their needs, rights, aspirations and cultural contexts rarely shape digital platform and service design (Livingstone, Third & Lansdown, 2021; Lenhart & Owens, 2021). Digital platforms are predominantly created by, and for, global North populations, disproportionately representing and reinforcing the dominance of white, educated, industrialised, and wealthy worldviews.

This ‘colonised internet’, a product of design practices that overlook diverse contexts and cultures, restricts children’s and young people’s access and exposes them to heightened risk of harm and injustice. Many young people in the global South report limited access to content in their own language and that they rarely see their cultures reflected online (Third & Moody, 2021). Research shows that Western-centric design can marginalise or silence culturally diverse identities and experiences; expose children to content that conflicts with or erodes their cultural values; reproduce global power imbalances; extract value from marginalised nations; and subtly influence homogenisation towards Western-centric, capitalist assumptions (Couldry & Meijas, 2019; Tripathi, 2021; Bon et al., 2022; Iliadis et al., 2023).

A colonised digital environment also limits children’s and young people’s abilities to use technologies in ways that support their health, wellbeing and future opportunities. It can inhibit self-expression, creativity and their sense of empowerment (Livingstone & Third, 2017) and reduce their capacity to challenge top-down hierarchies and inequalities (Herman & Arora, 2023). These conditions ultimately compromise children’s rights and safety online.

Children and young people themselves are calling for a more inclusive, safe and respectful internet that offers culturally relevant content and recognises them as legitimate rights holding users of digital products and platforms (Third & Moody, 2021). Designers are also increasingly acknowledging the need for change (Lenhart & Owens, 2021). While frameworks exist to support digital design that realises children's rights (e.g. Livingstone & Pothong, 2023) and design-justice work (Costanzo-Chock, 2020) offers guidance for addressing diverse needs, there is currently no practical framework to ensure underrepresented children’s and young people’s cultural perspectives meaningfully shape inclusive digital design.

Achieving equitable, inclusive, and empowering online environments for young people globally requires foregrounding youth-centred perspectives and centring culture in all stages of design and development. The pilot study explored these missing perspectives from the viewpoint of children and young people themselves by investigating:

• How children and young people understand and express ‘culture’
• How culture intersects with their experiences of digital technologies
• What culture-centred design means to them and how they experience culture-blind design
• Differences and similarities across diverse geographic, class and socio-political contexts
• What principles, children and young people believe should inform inclusive, ethical and safe digital design

Background

Culture

Culture is a multi-faceted concept used to understand complex, entwined, divergent, and evolving social patterns. Culture encompasses ideas, meanings, representations as well as events, practices, values, and material aspects. Its scope includes art and architecture, law and infrastructure, civic issues and civic participation, family, sport, fashion, food, politics, religion, industry and work. Culture is not ‘natural’, it is something that is cultivated and negotiated through customs, traditions, rituals, lores, artefacts, aesthetics, heritage, forms of leisure, beliefs, ideologies, attitudes, habits, habits, norms, and values (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). These elements shape identities and social hierarchies across gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, caste, and more. Culture is expressed through shared symbols and meanings within specific groups and made through material and social relations through technologies, artefacts, and embodied behaviours and everyday practices, alongside beliefs, ideals and traditions. Culture is inherently adaptive, evolving both internally and in response to external influences, such as technological innovation and globalization.

‘Imaginaries’

One productive way to understand culture is through the concept of ‘imaginaries’. Castoriadis (2005) conceptualised ‘imaginary’ as an organizing principle for understanding and negotiating social lives. Imaginaries are how people envision what does and does not represent their culture. These imaginaries are articulated through rituals, practices, ideologies, discourses, customs, traditions, mythologies, folklore and aspirations. Imaginaries are dynamic and exceed any single expression, they highlight the creative and evolving nature of culture. Social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004) are the shared ways of imagining social lives that guide everyday conduct and enable collective practices. These imaginaries are descriptive and normative, as they reflect taken for granted ways of navigating life, and represent tacit knowledge of what is desirable or prohibited. Understanding social imaginaries requires attendance to the socio-historical conditions or contexts that give meaning to everyday practices or knowledges. In this sense, social imaginaries connect to cultural scripts, such as when people evince knowledge of the social norms that are in alignment with, or contravention of, the expectations of one's culture. Just as culture is evolving, new social imaginaries emerge as ideas diverge from long-held traditions and new rituals flourish though practice, reshaping cultural repertoires.

Culture + Digital: Sociotechnical imaginaries

Digital technological advancements are profoundly reshaping social imaginaries (Sebastian & Shumar, 2018). The internet and networked media are now deeply entwined in daily life, shaping consumption, leisure, education, commerce, services, social connection and community, and identity formation (Oreglia & Ling, 2018; Pathak-Shelat & DeShano, 2014). Mediated by the Internet of Things (IOT), digital connectivity extends across devices – phones, wearables, household appliances, cars and public interfaces. Digital technologies are not just channels for cultural activities, they are themselves cultural because people appropriate them to act, connect, imagine and organise. With generative and agentic AI, the potential for digital technologies to influence, expand, and structure human thought and action has intensified. These technologies are in many ways inextricable from the way we imagine and make sense of the world (Bhatia & Pathak-Shelat, 2024). The term ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) captures this interplay describing the collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures which are rooted in shared understandings of social life that technology makes possible (p.4). This concept also underlines how hopes and fears of harm coexist in assessments of technological change.

Culture + Digital + Children

Children and adolescents today comprise one in three users of the internet (Pathak-Shelat, Saesha, & Chaudhary, 2022) and actively engage across multiple devices (Statista, 2024). Digital media are key interfaces for leisure, education, peer networks, identity exploration, cultural expression, and civic participation (Livingstone & Pothong, 2022; Steinsbekk et al. 2024). Yet stark digital divides persist: only approximately a quarter of people in low-income regions are online compared to close to those in high-income regions (UNICEF, 2024) which limits many children’s opportunities.

Popular debates often position children as at risk online, overlooking the many benefits for wellbeing and possibilities for cultural connection. Digital technologies can familiarise children with world cultures, to strengthen local cultural ties, nurture alternative cultural imaginaries and support civic engagement. For example, social media provides avenues for self-expression, ‘playful’ political activism, and fostering peer networks around shared cultural interests and ethnic identity formation and exploration (Sarwatay, Lee, & Kaye, 2023; Park, 2022). It can be a space to question dominant gender norms and negotiate cultural expectations around family and relationships (Krogh et al., 2024; Szabó, 2025) or to participate in political initiatives which cultivate collective agency (Roque, Dasgupta, & Costanza-Chock, 2016). Digital engagement however is not unilaterally positive. Digital spaces can expose children – especially minorities - to commercial exploitation, age inappropriate or culturally offensive content and prejudice (Livingstone & Pothong, 2022). Online cultures portrayals may be one-dimensional, exoticized, or harmful potentially silencing or marginalising negatively (Farrand & Carrapico, 2013; Ging & Siapera, 2019; Lu & Zhao, 2018; Margolis & Amanbekova, 2023, Torres, 2025).

While much research on the digital practices of children exists, how children’s digital engagement translate to their social and cultural imaginaries remains underexplored. Notable exceptions, such as Bhatia & Pathak-Shelat (2024), explore “transcultural digital imaginaries”—evolving, collective frameworks people use to understand their sociocultural lives amid transnational flows of communication, values and experiences. For children and young people, these imaginaries form at the intersection of their local cultural eco-system and the transcultural experiences enabled through digital engagements. Transcultural digital imaginaries help children adapt to evolving digital ecosystems but also catalyse transformations within their local cultural worlds.

Towards Culture-Centred Design

To respond to this complexity, we advocate for culture – centred design with and for young people. Our vision is that technology designers and policy makers take children’s cultural imaginaries as a starting point for designing digital products, services and policies, recognises children as rights-holding, knowledgeable participants whose perspectives have too often been sidelined in policy and design (Chelvachandran & Michael, 2022; Livingstone, Ólafsson & Pothong, 2025). By foregrounding these imaginaries, designers and policymakers can better recognise diversity within and across communities and build digital environments that are inclusive, ethical and culturally safe. Ultimately, centring children’s cultural perspectives can help shape digital futures that reflect plural ways of living, learning and belonging.

In this research project, spanning multiple geographies and geo-cultural locations, seeks to lay the foundation for an understanding of children’s and young people’s cultural and sociotechnical imaginaries to inform policy and practice in digital design. We did not supply fixed definitions of “culture”, instead, we invited children to articulate how they understand, express and share their cultural imaginaries—in their own words. The following describes what they had to say.