Megan Fahy

Title: Fostering digital social capital through design for Wellbeing

Supervision Team: Marguerite Barry, UCD / Gavin Doherty, TCD / Jane Walsh, UoG

Description: Studies in eHealth have shown that communication technologies can support intervention and treatment through the exchange of ‘social capital’ (SC), a concept from social science with a range of individual and societal benefits. Although a strong association between SC and wellbeing has been identified, there is a lack of empirical data and consistent methods to foster social capital through design. This project begins by systematically exploring the position of social capital within HCI to identify core design challenges for eHealth. Then, using participatory design methods, it will prototype technologies and develop a novel design framework based on platform independent interactive features of digital applications.