Living Well in a Digital World

Published: 14 June 2023

Event recording

The Living Well in a Digital World all day event and project development forum was organised and hosted by the Digital Society and Economy Interdisciplinary Research Theme, supported by the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

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 Digital Society and Economy Interdisciplinary Research Theme work, how they engage culturally, how they 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 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. This session is bringing business, policy, and academic experts together to address how to define wellbeing in relation to productivity. Speakers included:

Watch the full video of The Gaitherin event on the CoSS YouTube channel. 


First published: 14 June 2023