Designing Cyberbullying Mitigation and Prevention Solutions through Participatory Design With Teenagers

While social media platforms enable individuals to easily communicate and share experiences, they have also emerged as a tool for cyberbullying. Teenagers represent an especially vulnerable population for negative emotional responses to cyberbullying. At the same time, attempts to mitigate or prevent cyberbullying from occurring in these networked spaces have largely failed because of the complexity and nuance with which young people bully others online. To address challenges related to designing for cyberbullying intervention and mitigation, we detail findings from participatory design work with two groups of high school students in spring 2015. Over the course of five design sessions spanning five weeks, participants shared their experiences with cyberbullying and iteratively designed potential solutions. We provide an in-depth discussion of the range of cyberbullying mitigation solutions participants designed. We focus on challenges participants' identified in designing for cyberbullying support and prevention and present a set of five potential cyberbullying mitigation solutions based on the results of the design sessions.