On June 9, 2022, The Children and Youth Administration of Copenhagen commenced a wave of initiatives to improve the youth clubs of Copenhagen.

We partnered up with KBH+ AskovFonden in our project Kurator to shed light on the young peoples’ needs and wishes, to surface insights about what constitutes a good community for them, and to help the youth club workers understand and navigate the digital world.

According to The Danish Center for Social Science Research, VIVE, young people in Denmark spend less and less physical time with one another. 

Furthermore, the Youth Analysis 2023 conducted by The Danish Youth Council concludes that young people spend more and more time on digital platforms.

However, the analysis also concludes that 73 percent of the young participants rate close relations as the single most important aspect of leading a good life. 

This led us to ask: how might we translate the value created by the youth clubs onto a digital counterpart?

The Results: Six insights and nine recommendations

By facilitating design-driven workshops, we gave the young people a voice. In doing so, we uncovered six valuable insights, and to guide any future prototypes and further explorations, we put together nine recommendations.

As we set sail, the youth clubs helped recruit participants for the interviews and the workshops, ensuring adequate representation of the young peoples’ various interests, motivations, and backgrounds. 

From these workshops and interviews, we found six insights:

1. The young people find the relation to the workers to be paramount.
2. The young people don’t recognize the value of a digital youth club — yet.
3. The young people are very aware of their screen time. But, when they consume content driven by their interests, they have trouble moderating their screen time.
4. The young people are cognizant of what content they’re presented with but less cognizant about what mechanisms operate under the surface.
5. The young people are more likely to share content in smaller and closed-off online communities and prefer being anonymous in larger online communities.
6. The young people prefer consuming content rather than creating content.

The How: Workshops and interviews

To develop a solid understanding of the young people’s digital habits and everyday lives, we facilitated design-driven workshops and conducted interviews with them on their home turf.

The first order in creating lasting and meaningful impact is to understand the needs and wishes of the people whose lives will be impacted. We facilitated two design-driven workshops with 29 young participants from seven youth clubs to achieve this. 

Additionally, we conducted nine interviews, some with individuals and some with groups of 2-4 participants. In total, we interviewed 26 young people between the ages of 14 and 17.

Were we to continue Kurator, we would establish a learning mechanism revolving around The Digital Ethics Compass to build capacity with youth club workers, a continuous learning loop expanding the workers’ ability to understand and navigate the digital world, and for the project to learn from their pedagogical knowledge. 

Thus, co-creating the digital youth club alongside the involved parties through further design-driven workshops tailored to the purpose.