The Quality of the Relationship

Technology is deeply integrated into everyday life, yet conversations about "healthy technology use" often focus on measures like screen time or reducing digital consumption. That explanation has never felt complete to me.

I've had days when hours spent using technology left me feeling creative, connected, and capable of meaningful work—and much shorter interactions that left me distracted or depleted. The amount of time wasn't necessarily what distinguished those experiences. The quality of the experience was.

Of course, technology may not be the only explanation. Mood, rest, motivation, context, and what I was using technology for could all contribute to the difference. But that uncertainty raised the question I wanted to investigate:

What makes technology use feel supportive in some contexts and disruptive in others?

I began with a hypothesis: healthy technology use may depend less on the amount of time spent with technology and more on the quality of the interaction between the person, the technology, and the context in which it is used.

I suspected factors such as agency, intention, attention, purpose, and emotional outcomes might matter—but I didn't yet know whether the research would support that framing.

I turned to research on digital well-being to understand whether the differences I noticed in my own experience were reflected in the literature.

I focused on four questions:

1. How is digital well-being understood and measured?
2. What does screen time capture—and what does it miss?
3. What factors shape whether technology use produces benefits or drawbacks?
4. What might those factors mean for the design of digital experiences?

Finding 01

Time doesn't explain the whole experience.

Across the literature, screen time emerged as an incomplete way of understanding digital well-being. The same amount of technology use can involve different activities, motivations, contexts, and outcomes. What someone is doing with technology—and what happens through that interaction—can matter as much as how long the interaction lasts.

Finding 02

Benefits and drawbacks can coexist.

Technology use does not fall neatly into "good" or "bad." The same connectivity that supports communication, access to information, autonomy, or accomplishing a goal can also create distraction, loss of control, or interference with other parts of life.

Digital well-being may therefore be less about eliminating technology's negative effects and more about finding a balance where the benefits remain useful without the drawbacks taking over.

Finding 03

Context changes the experience.

The same technology can affect people differently depending on who is using it, what they are doing, why they are using it, how the technology is designed, and what is happening around them.

Mood, purpose, social expectations, and design features can all shape the experience. This helps explain why apparently similar technology use can produce very different experiences—even within the same person at different times.

Finding 04

What counts as "well-being" matters.

"Well-being" does not mean just one thing. It can mean how someone feels, how satisfied they are with their life, their physical and mental health, their relationships, their sense of control, or whether they are able to pursue things they find meaningful.

That matters when studying technology. One study might ask whether social media affects anxiety, while another looks at life satisfaction, relationships, attention, or a person's ability to accomplish their goals. Both may be studying "digital well-being," but they are measuring different parts of a person's life.

So asking whether technology is "good" or "bad" for well-being isn't specific enough. We also have to ask: good or bad for what part of well-being?

Finding 05

Design is part of the relationship.

Digital well-being isn't only about how people manage their technology use. The design of the technology matters too.

Features and design decisions can affect what captures our attention, how much control we have, what choices are encouraged, and how easily we can act according to our own goals.

That means responsibility for digital well-being doesn't sit entirely with the user. Designers also make choices that can support—or interfere with—people's ability to use technology in ways that work for them.

This synthesis draws on research by Moritz Büchi and Mariek M. P. Vanden Abeele on digital well-being, OECD research on digital transformation and well-being, and work on the ethics of digital well-being by Burr and colleagues.

I started with the idea that healthy technology use might depend less on time spent and more on the "quality of the relationship" between a person and technology.

I still think the relationship matters, but I would describe it differently now. There does not appear to be one characteristic that determines whether technology use is healthy. What happens instead depends on the person, what they are doing with technology, how the technology is designed, and the context in which they are using it.

Time is one part of that picture, but it cannot explain the experience on its own.

I also began this investigation thinking primarily about what people do with technology. The literature pushed me to consider the other direction: what technology is designed to do to, for, and with people. Digital well-being is therefore not only a question of individual habits or self-regulation. It is also a question of design.

That leaves me less interested in defining a universally "healthy" relationship with technology and more interested in understanding the conditions under which digital environments support agency, meaningful action, connection, capability, and other dimensions of human well-being.

One tension from this investigation stayed with me: if digital well-being depends on the person, purpose, design, and context, there may be no universal prescription for a "healthy" relationship with technology.

I translated that tension into a speculative design artifact: a prescription bottle built around the idea that there is no single prescription to give.

View the Speculative Rx artifact ↗

This investigation stops here for now. I began it before studying behavioral science and human-centered design more formally, and I would approach its next stage differently today.

Rather than moving directly from the literature to a proposed solution, I would use these findings to narrow the problem space, identify whose experiences I want to understand, and conduct primary research around specific contexts of technology use. From there, I could synthesize patterns into clearer opportunity areas before deciding whether a framework, experiment, prototype, or intervention is appropriate.

Possible directions include exploring how particular design features affect agency and attention, how people recognize when technology is supporting or interfering with what they value, or how digital experiences might be evaluated against dimensions of well-being beyond engagement and screen time.