Briefing paper: Living Well in a Digital World
Published: 7 June 2023
What is a just, inclusive society? How do we live well, particularly in the digital age? This briefing paper summarises key learnings and discussion from a recent all-day event and project development forum organised by the Digital Society and Economy Interdisciplinary Research Theme. Moving away from disciplinary silos, diverse expert speakers and attendees discussed how to live well with new technologies in an increasingly complex world.
This briefing paper builds on the learnings from the event: Living Well in a Digital World (May 2023).
This event explored what it means to live well by centring the social, cultural, educational, and economic contexts of digital technologies as opposed to the technologies themselves. The challenges of living well in a digital society were explored through a series of workshop sessions:
- Sustainable productivity: Employee wellbeing and business growth
- Cultural participation: Changes in exhibition and audiences
- Digital (in)justice: Security, surveillance and the future of justice
- Intersectional (in)equalities in a digital world
Moving away from disciplinary silos, diverse expert speakers and attendees discussed how to live well with new technologies in an increasingly complex world.
Wellbeing is at the heart of how we work, how we engage culturally, how we enact justice, and address social and digital inequalities. This briefing paper shares the main insights from keynote speakers and highlights from group discussions around problems and opportunities in a digital world. Event participants concluded that researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and industry leaders must:
- Understand wellbeing and participation as core to living well
- Develop new research approaches and methodologies that bring together technological, social, and cultural perspectives
- Develop innovation in policy in terms of better understanding what resources and information people need to live well
You can read the report in full here: Living Well in a Digital World: Briefing Paper May 2023.
The Gaitherin: Sustainable productivity: employee wellbeing and business growth
The Gaitherin: Sustainable productivity: employee wellbeing and product growth
The Gaitherin brings together Scotland's most innovative academic and business minds for regular networking events. The Gaitherin session 'Sustainable productivity: employee wellbeing and business growth' was a key part of the 'Living Well in a Digital World' programme on 18 May, with the aim of bringing together business, policy, and academic experts to address how to define wellbeing in relation to productivity.
Speakers included: Louisa Macdonell, Director, Scotland, Business in the Community; Eleonora Vanello, Productivity Club Programme Manager, SCDI; Rachel Brown, CEO Creative Entrepreneurs Club; Prof. Shona Hilton, Public Health Policy at University of Glasgow; Will Phillips, Senior Analyst, RAND Corporation.
The Living Well in a Digital World all day event and project development forum was organised and hosted by the Digital Society and Economy Interdisicplinary Research Theme, supported by the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow.
First published: 7 June 2023