 talking a little bit about the future and some guidelines that I learned from some wise people I know who happen to be teens, twins, and even littler kids. And like any good story about teens this story begins at, you guessed it, the mall. Remember the mall? Yeah. I mean I hadn't been there in a long time because I don't know I work in tech and I shop online and when my kids were really little it was kind of nerve-wracking to go because they would be begging me please please get me this thing and I'm the yes parent so you know we'd end up with a lot of plastic crap in our house so I tried to avoid it but a couple years ago my oldest daughter was turning 11 and she had this dream and the dream was a simple one she wanted me to take three of her friends and herself to the mall for her birthday and I thought to myself well don't really want to do it but I'm probably gonna get parenting gold stars for this so I'm gonna do it and it was kind of a learning experience because you know they wanted some freedom so it was a little bit like flying a kite you know I had to like give them a little line and then reel them back in and so what happened is I kind of quietly stalked them throughout their day and then we met back at the food court and over our smoothies the girls started doing something that I thought was kind of interesting they were sharing pictures that they took on their phones they were saying oh you know this one I need to text this to my mom because I didn't have enough money for this but I want to get this in the future and oh that one should go on our group Instagram account because I think that's okay for everyone to see but that one should go Instagram direct to these two people because we don't want everyone else to feel left out and they're snapping the pictures to each other and on and on it went through the smoothies through the whole ride home through getting back to our home and my daughter unpacking her haul and you know I'm standing there at the door of a room like wow that was really really interesting do you think I could talk to your friends a little bit about what just happened there and she's like mom don't study me because because that's what I do I'm I'm a design researcher and a big part of what I do every day is try to understand how we're using technology and that emotional kind of irrational relationship we have to technology and I'm really interested in this group because I feel like a lot of times we kind of take them for granted we say oh they're digital natives they know what's going on they you know will figure it out and at the same time we're kind of fretting like oh they're on it too much and they're losing their humanity and so I mapped out our journey today I modeled it after a post-apocalyptic young adult fiction novel in which we will undergo some trials and we will end in a triumphant place unfortunately it's a place where kids rule and grown-ups rule so let's talk a little bit about this generation they're huge 25% of the population in the US is 17 and under that's bigger than boomers might be bigger than Millennials even and it was a little battling to me at first because I thought well aren't these kids of Gen Xers Gen X kind of a small generation what's going on here but if you look around you'll you'll quickly realize that Millennials are having kids Gen Xers are having kids baby boomers are having kids and they're all kind of going together in this in this one group that we're calling Gen Z well at this point you're probably wondering to yourself what generation am I so I have a little quiz for you so you can just shout out if you're square number one square number two and apologies to square number two though that was a bad era for Disney that's my era all of our parents were busy having key parties and they couldn't make good movies for us so number three or number four how did you watch this movie and I swear I'll get rid of these these silly effects here did you watch it mainly in a movie theater was that the big new technology or was it VHS or DVDs or are you watching it on your iPad what was the hot new tech toy of your youth one two three or four and then I thought about music and there's lots of different choices they kind of look the same on this one but these are really different choices or maybe you think of your your pop singers right or you're a little funky this one makes me a little sad actually love you Prince how did you listen to music yeah you remember some of these things and then finally I looked at well what was each generation's vision of the future so first we have a vision of a disembodied computer and things go horribly wrong then we kind of in Blade Runner we move out of that 2001 Space Odyssey world and the the humans and computers are kind of blending together you can't tell the difference and things go horribly wrong then in the matrix we merge with the computers that's coming and things go horribly wrong and then finally come the hunger games huge income disparity there's people watching on you know in a high-tech world and there's the low-tech world and of course there's bows and arrows and hunting of people and things go terribly wrong so alright which one were you if you chose number one your baby boomers is where I offend everyone because media is so quick to characterize us but you are Woodstock rock and roll free love then came number two the Gen Xers they were slackers and knew all the definitions of irony but their brains were destroyed by MTV that would be me millennials you guys get a bad rap everyone's down on the millennials but you had to suffer through Alf and saved by the bell so I thank you to get some credit for that so but if you look at this look at how Gen Z is being characterized quite differently from these other deadbeat generations before them and sometimes I think you know there's there's a general consensus that it's because they lived through something of a post apocalyptic young adult fiction novel if you look at starting when they were born mostly around 2000 off to the far side those are bad futures that didn't quite happen so why 2k if you remember to quite happen but there's other stuff going on and they're getting older and going to middle school thank God that Mayan thing didn't happen right that would have been bad and now they're in high school some of them are in high school some of them are still little and I hesitated that putting the little triangle at the end of my arrow we hope that there will be something beyond 2017 but remains to be seen hopefully they'll go to college so this generation is a little different they're being characterized differently and they really want to make a difference and have an impact they are already entrepreneurs we've always had teens experimenting and entrepreneurship we've always had this impulse to kind of save the world but it's really strong in this generation and a lot of other things look different friendships look different family looks different the world looks a little different are you seeing the pattern here yeah it's technology is making this generation much different they are spending 25 of their life or more on screen right now they are a good portion of them are mobile only or at least mobile first a lot of them are on phones this is in the U.S. I have these stats for grown-ups these are only for teens so you can see the bathroom statistic is definitely under reported here and of course we've experimented with the teens there's been various ways we've tried to separate them from their phones and here's the University of Maryland study that was done recently where kids were separated from their phones I don't know how far if it was only a couple inches or another room or whatever but they hooked them up to biometrics and they're right and they came up with the obvious result that they had a lot of anxiety when they didn't have their phones near them in our diary study we had people turn in things like this I know yeah I have no phobia fear of being without my phone and of course they're creating kind of dramatizations of this here's an example come on man eat your food how am I supposed to eat it like any of this instagram picture I've ever just eat it dude I'm sure I just butter myself that it's hella delicious in a world without touch screens how do you read more in a world I'm not some child but what you're doing all the time I'm scared man nothing makes sense anymore well it's like Gandhi always said we have nothing to fear but fear itself you mean Roosevelt no I'm pretty sure that's Gandhi well we'll just have to see if Wikipedia has saved out of that who's Wikipedia it doesn't exist then how are we supposed to prove people wrong oh my god so okay whatever we know they're very attached to their phones at least for the moment but what does this mean for the future of technology what can we learn so what I tried to do is is the type of thing I usually do which is look toward bigger datasets and social listening and combine that more data heavy approach with interviews and diaries and observations to see what we can learn and I think one thing that really came out of this is that maybe teens and tweens and kids are just doing things at kind of a higher volume and a faster rate and they're amplifying some of the trends that we're already seeing what we came up with was five areas that we're seeing trends in that might impact the future of all technology so let's start with community hopefully it won't be like this in maze runner but if you listen to npr after the story about the old blues guy and the story about baseball there's going to be another story about how kids don't have places to hang out anymore but in fact they're hanging out online so twitch came up a lot in our research and if you're not familiar with twitch what it is is somebody's playing a video game and other people are hanging out and watching it and commenting it and at first I saw this and I was kind of puzzled I thought to myself well how lazy can you possibly be I mean back in my day at least we played our own video games come on but really I mean it's about community and even the little z's have their communities this is club penguin which recently shut down and it actually still looks like this 10 years later it's these community spaces they'll suffer through anything kids to have their community just so that they can talk to other kids and probably half of these penguins here aren't even kids and that's what's really sad and scary so so they are social media natives they're on all these different channels trying to find their place in the world and to build their tribe and their community now a lot has been said recently a dark social and if you guys don't know what that is depending on your generation you might visualize it's something like this depending on what you are but but it's really not not scary it's anonymous and that keeps coming back in communities if any of you are old enough to remember you know 90s and anonymous chat rooms some of that same behavior is coming out again on whisper and which i think is now gone and some of the other anonymous channels where kids went to kind of explore identity and different things they could do but they ended up with bad behavior and with bullying a lot of them are experiencing that kind of thing this may not sound too unfamiliar to the rest of us living out in the world say on twitter for example but they're experiencing some of that same thing and most of the kids even though they like that once in a while really are more interested in experimenting with their identity than being anonymous and they're doing it in a lot of ways that are pretty interesting they have multiple instagram accounts they have finsta accounts the the fake account where they can be real they have instagram accounts that are real where they're being fake they have multiple accounts for pets and groups they're getting facebook married all the time they are pruning their profiles and changing according to who they feel like they are in the moment and on that day so they are creating communities and identities in really fluid and interesting and varied ways that are kind of a microcosm of what's happening generally speaking in technology they're also moving from just local communities or communities of interest to global communities so this these kids have friends actual friends in other countries maybe not maybe they're not interacting on vr like this not yet um not just pen pals like we had right like you had the pen pal from italy and you wrote one letter and you're like hey maybe i'll go to italy someday they're actually doing it they're actually interacting with people and they're participating in grown-up conversations so this is twitter visualization of ferguson that's probably the first big event where we saw kids getting involved in grown-up conversations in grown-up spaces and we kind of forget this a lot of times when we're developing software and we're kind of in the zone and we're just thinking about getting to the next milestone that kids are in these grown-up spaces and even though we may think they're acting grown-up they're still kids on some level now community is also very very micro it's their families and lots of these kids love presenting possible selves for their siblings for their little brothers for their sisters and we got a lot of um insights from parents on this too and i was a little surprised because a lot of parents thought i thought they would be upset by this but when they saw this they thought wow i'm getting a new view on my kids that i don't normally get i don't normally get to see these things a lot of times and that's a bummer but when i do i get kind of a new point of view on kids and then of course if we ask kids well would you sacrifice all of your social media friends for one best friend in real life you get answers like this so real life is still a thing apparently but what does this mean what's our takeaway for the future of technology we are constantly shifting identities shifting roles shifting communities shifting context and when we're designing and developing experiences that needs to be something that we keep coming back to and touching upon as a core value okay let's move on to communication so we know that texting is up and calls are down we know that we're texting each other in our own homes guilty i do it all the time um i even Skype my kids and video chat inside my home it's bad um so whenever you need to feel like a good parent you'll be like hey yeah i'm better than her i'll give you that one they are talking and we know right now voice is really hot but this is from 2014 55 percent of teens we're talking to their computers and according to google and they were doing their homework and they were searching and they were hoping that somehow magically they could order pizza this way and of course now this is an area that is really exciting for kids and one reason that we of course they like to joke with Alexa and taunt Alexa and tease her mercilessly but also they can't read well yet they can't write well yet it's a way it's a way to engage it's a way in and it's a way to learn and so kids are early adopters of voice however email not their thing they're not in the work world yet and i think what we saw going on here is that real time for this generation anyway is so valued because they're time shifting all the time they don't want something that time shifts they want something that's now that's recent that's present and they want to communicate in a lot of different ways so i wish i could Skype with taylor swift back in the day when she did that on my space um but they are doing video chat emojis images text it's multi-layered and they've been doing this for a long time and it's still we think to ourselves we'll do that now too but when think about an event you've been at recently i'll tell you about a concert kids concert i was out recently and the parents are holding up their phones there's a few holding up ipads and they're recording the whole thing are they gonna go back and watch it probably not they're gonna probably gonna post it to facebook though and i'm gonna have to like it at least but the kids you look at the kids and they are snapping each other they're drawing they're joking around they're texting they're being creative and multi-layered and textured in their communication because technology lets them do that and they've adapted to that and so i think that's an interesting trend so they're using technology as a way to experience something together a lot of times they don't have a lot to say you know they're just trying to keep that connection going so we hear a lot about how we don't know how to have conversations anymore we can't communicate anymore a lot of conversation is really just keeping that bond sometimes conveying a mood through an image um it was surprising to me how many kids said i spend a lot of time going through my pictures and going through my old snaps and snap stories and time hop and i thought to myself well how far can they hop but they they are doing it because it's a new way to consider themselves and to express themselves to others and so i think what we can take away from from this is that we need to let people communicate in open multi-textured multi-layered ways all right let's go into privacy and you're thinking to yourself kids in privacy they don't care about privacy well it's a little different i mean they're early social media adopters and the reason why is they're trying to be private away from us they don't want teachers they don't want parents they don't want any grown-ups into their stuff normal right that's that's like all teens and they'll go to great lengths to do it and use the technology to do it probably smartwatches are going to be banned at the school now that that this has happened but it's a very clever use of technology and in studies kids admit to hiding not all the bad stuff that maybe used to go on i mean this is a pretty good cohort of kids teen pregnancies are down smoking is down they're a little bit overweight compared to previous generations but what they're doing is they're going online ironically and i know this because i'm a john xer and i understand irony ironically to hide their online activities even the little ones are developing devious ways to hide their online activity so it doesn't look like they're online as much as they are or the grown-ups don't know what they're doing and they try to use privacy controls i thought this was a really shocking number how many kids are trying to use privacy controls but in our study we found that even though they're trying they're actually not succeeding very well at using those privacy controls and so they come up with alternatives they go dark on their accounts they go take down temporarily their facebook account for the night when they know their parents will be online i'm looking and then they go back on again they switch account names all the time they have all these workarounds wouldn't it be better if our default was more private wouldn't that be better for everyone let's just think about that i like that okay creativity well we think to ourselves isn't technology about productivity and efficiency we're and besides we don't want to use it for creativity because we have this divide we think of like okay we are on technology too much and we have to detox it's like a pathology we have to get out off of technology we still have this strict divide between the two even some of us might even recognize this this crazy sound but kids don't really have that they're moving fluidly between these two worlds as if they're not really two worlds so they're playing with dolls in a real doll a physical doll and they're playing with a doll on their ipad they're playing play kitchen and they're doing a game on their ipad at the same time they're playing something with friends or they're hanging out with their their cool tween friends behind a locked door and they are videoing the whole thing for their other friends who aren't there they are really you know using it in all these ways and we kind of lament like oh kids they're on their springs all the time they're not bored they're not bored enough they're not bored in the way we were bored in the good old days where we were hopelessly bored we were laying on our beds staring at the ceiling we're like please somebody help me i'm so bored but they are they're just bored in a new way and it still has the same effect it drives them to be creative but they're not being creative so much with pens and pencils and writing you know their their pals in italy longhand letters instead they're doing it on the computer and they're making these gifts to their parents to their friends um here's another good example that came in the diaries bf up flip a gram i mean isn't that great wouldn't it be great if one of your friends made that for you i don't think it will ever happen but it would be great wouldn't it because we're all natural storytellers and kids have maybe a little more time to experiment with this but we all want to tell our stories and we all want to use technology to do it so the takeaway for this is let's leave it more open let's leave some options for people to contribute and participate in a way that isn't prescribed in the first place finally we'll end up maybe where we should have started the future of the interface so we think that these digital natives know so much and part of the reason they do is because they're using technology together they're spending a lot of time showing each other technology i have this little project that i do when i'm bored because i'm traveling a lot and i'm observing people in a non creepy non-threatening way um and noting what how they're configured i guess with technology are they heads down by themselves are they talking about it together what's their facial expression and i have all these cryptic little drawings in my notebook which i'm not going to share but what i've noticed is because they're too too awful is there's kind of this co-use curve so when children are little um and even through their teens they're using technology together a lot and they're sharing the secrets that they learned about how to use snapchat together and they're showing each other things and they're creating kind of folklore and mythology about how things work just the same way that we might create folklore or mythology about how the facebook algorithm works for instance we come up with our own explanations because we don't know what that explanation is but they're using it together and then it kind of dips down where we're all sort of heads down and we're not talking to each other and not doing anything together and then it tips up a little bit at the end and you'll notice this if you go to an airport or you're out at a park you'll see these lovely older couples and they're looking at their phones together and it's like oh Henry look at the grandchildren and they figure out things together like happens again right at the at the two two ends so they're using it but they're using it very idiosyncratically so we think that they're these experts but they're not really learning how to use technology what they learn in school is how to make a power point or our school even has coding classes but they're not that not anything that you would ever want to use in the future and so they are teaching each other and kind of learning it as they go on the street and the problem with this is they actually are not as successful using technology as grown-ups are because they're in these grown-up spaces so in places especially like nonprofits and education websites and apps that are geared towards learning where maybe there isn't as much money thrown at the development and design process they have a harder time e-commerce they're doing better especially with the help of Alexa you guys saw the story don't spread this around so you know we think that they have it all figured out but they're still learning and then of course there's this problem we all have this kids even worse we have a very short attention span maybe goldfish attention span i don't know i feel like we have more attention than goldfish though because i don't see goldfish developing rails apps for instance anything like that so i i don't think so and kids are not just multi-screening on two screens sometimes but even up to three four five screens at a time so not only do they maybe not know everything they could be doing or should be doing or how to do everything but they're incredibly distracted okay so you get the idea and of course their ergonomics are poor so we might remember reading a book under the covers with a flashlight i decided to explore this phenomenon of dropping phones because you're using them in all kinds of crazy positions yeah so using the oldest worst crappiest phones and computers in the house the reason why is because well they're dropping them all the time on their heads on the floor in the toilet um so there's that but they also don't understand cloud storage i mean who really does and and they forget their password all the time they're on big old laptops even big desktop computers in the family room so they've got the worst technology in the house so the lesson we can take away from this i think is to design for the worst case scenario i think by being inclusive being accessible thinking about kind of the lowest end experience we do ourselves a service all of us um and so i think it's a good guideline for all of us so i've made a little recap and emojis of the talk in case you've forgotten any important points here but i think that you know we've talked a lot about this current phase of black rectangles with screens a lot of these same principles though apply to chatbots and robots and voice experiences as well and even though we're talking about kids and teens and tweens and we're labeling them Gen Z we have to remember that all of these generational labels are really marketing categories and so we do we can identify with the culture of our generation and some of the fun culture references but really a lot of that is geared toward marketing to us in a way and i think what we can do as developers and as designers is to push back on that a little bit and resist a little bit and say you know what there are some common values across all the generations and when we look to the younger generation maybe we see it more amplified than we might in other generations maybe they're adopting things a little earlier maybe they're a little more creative and idiosyncratic in their use but there's something in there for all of us so i feel like now we have seen enough and we know enough that we can take a pledge so i'd like you to take your hand and put it over your heart i'm sorry and repeat after me i do solemnly swear to all the rock stars in this room to my new best friend Pamela to the future generations who inspire me i will assume nothing and design responsibly and with the power vested in me as speaker i now pronounce you an awesome audience thank you very much