About the Digital Kaleidoscope

We are a research group at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, studying how digital technology shapes the wellbeing of young people.

Digital technologies like video games, social media, streaming platforms are inextricable from children and adolescents lives. But due to challenges accessing the right kind of data, and limitations in the kinds of methods researchers have been using, we still know surprisingly little about how they actually affect how young people feel, think, and develop.

We take a different approach. Using behavioural data collected directly from devices across multiple platforms, alongside short daily check-ins with participants, we study the specific features of digital experiences - not just how long, but what they’re doing, with whom, and in what context. We combine these methods with rigorous causal modelling and open science practices to produce findings that are transparent, reproducible, and actionable.

Why “Kaleidoscope”?

A kaleidoscope turns fragments into patterns. Young people’s digital lives can feel similarly fragmented — scattered across apps, platforms, and devices, shifting moment to moment throughout the day. Our research treats that complexity seriously rather than flattening it into a single number. By bringing together detailed behavioural data from across a young person’s digital experience, we look for the patterns within the fragments: what combinations of activities, contexts, and needs actually matter for wellbeing, and for whom.

Principal Investigator

Dr Nick Ballou is a Research Fellow at the Dyson School of Design Engineering. He completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London and postdoctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute, where he worked with some of the world’s largest game companies to study how games affect player wellbeing. His work sits at the intersection of psychology, behavioural data science, and human-computer interaction, and he is an active advocate for open and reproducible research practices.

Funding

This research is generously supported by an Imperial College Research Fellowship and a Huo Family Foundation Early Career Fellowship.

What We’re Working Towards

Our goal is to move the science of digital wellbeing beyond headlines and moral panics toward evidence that is precise, honest about its limitations, and useful — for young people, for parents, for designers, and for policymakers.