some wise people I know who happen to be teens, tweens, 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, I don't really want to do it, but I'm probably going to get parenting gold stars for this, so I'm going to 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 hall. And, you know, I'm standing there at the door of a room and I'm 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 that's what I do. 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 a rational 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 drool. So let's talk a little bit about this generation. They're huge. Twenty-five percent of the population in the U.S. is 17 and under.

That's bigger than boomers, might be bigger than millennials even. And it was a little baffling to me at first because I thought, well, aren't these kids of Gen Xers? Gen X is kind of a small generation. What's going on here? But if you look around, 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 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. 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 silly effects here. Did you watch it mainly in a movie theater? Was that the big new technology or was it VHS? Oh, yeah, or DVDs? Or were

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 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 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, all right, which one were you? If you chose number one, you're Baby Boomers. This 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 think you should 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 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, Y2K, if you remember, didn't 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 at 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 in 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 that's 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 underreported 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 a 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

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 saying, yeah, I have nomophobia, fear of being without my phone. And, of course, they're creating kind of dramatizations of this. Here's an example.

Well, it's like Gandhi always said, we have nothing to fear but fear and stuff. You mean Roosevelt? No, I'm pretty sure that was Gandhi. Well, we'll just have to see what Wikipedia has to say about that. Who's Wikipedia?

If Wikipedia 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 the type of thing I usually do, which is look toward

bigger data sets 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 May's 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 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 of dark social. And if you guys don't know what that is, depending on your generation, you might visualize

it something like this, depending on what you are. But it's really not scary. It's anonymous. And that keeps coming back in communities. If any of you are old enough to remember, 90s and anonymous chat rooms, some of that same behavior is coming out again on Whisper

and Yik Yak, 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 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 in 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 these kids have friends, actual friends, in other countries. Maybe they're

not interacting on VR like this, not yet. Not just pen pals like we had, right? Like you have a 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 and 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 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. I even Skype my kids and video chat inside my home. That's bad. So, whenever you need to feel like a good parent, you'll be like, hey, 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. Fifty-five percent of teens were 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 to engage. It's a way to engage the 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 MySpace. But they are doing video chat, emojis, images, text. It's multilayered. And they've been doing this for a long time. And it's still, we think to ourselves, well, we 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 at 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 going to go back and watch it?

Probably not. They're probably going to post it to Facebook though. And I'm going to 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 multilayered

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 and we can't communicate anymore. A lot of conversation is really just keeping that bond, sometimes conveying a mood through an image. 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, how far can they hop? But 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 this

is that we need to let people communicate in open, multitextured, multilayered ways. All right, let's go on to privacy. And you're thinking to yourself, kids and 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 grownups into their stuff. Normal, right? 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 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 X-er and I understand irony,

ironically, to hide their online activities. Even the little ones are developing devious ways to hide their online activities so it doesn't look like they're online as much as they are or the grownups 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 and 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? 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 off of technology. We still have this strict divide between the two. Even some of us might even recognize 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 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 using it in all these ways and we kind of lament like, oh kids, they're on their screens 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 has the same effect. It drives them to be creative, but they're not being creative so much

with pens and pencils and writing their pals in Italy long hand letters. Instead, they're doing it on the computer and they're making these gifts to their parents, to their friends. Here's

a storyteller. 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 and noting 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 awful, is there's kind of this

co-use curve. So when children are little 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. It like happens again, right, at the two ends. So

they're using it, but they're using it very idiosyncratically. So we think that there are these experts, but they're not really learning how to use technology. What they learn in school is how to make a PowerPoint or our school even has coding classes, but they're

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 non-profits and education websites and apps that are geared towards learning where maybe there isn't as much money thrown at the development design process,

they have a harder time. E-commerce, they're doing better, especially with the help of Alexa. You guys saw this story? Don't spread this around. So 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,

or anything like that. So 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

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 they're 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. So there's that. But they also don't understand cloud storage. I mean, who really does? 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. 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.