Designing Empathy-Driven Tools to Combat Cyberbullying in Children
Hooman Gheshlaghi
Project Summary
Cyberbullying among children aged 8 to 12 is an escalating challenge, often overlooked in both policy and design. Hooman Gheshlaghi’s thesis tackles this issue by developing a cyberbullying assessment toolkit that empowers children to express their experiences safely while equipping parents with tools to recognize and respond effectively.
This study adopts a narrative and empathy-driven design approach, creating a high-fidelity prototype that integrates customizable avatars, journaling tools, emotion figurines, and analysis packages. The toolkit facilitates emotional expression and reflection for children while providing parents with structured data to understand the incident’s context and severity. Through semi-structured interviews with parents, the research surfaced five thematic benefits: improved communication, emotional support, intuitive usability, rich feedback, and deeper understanding of children’s reluctance to report incidents.
By blending human-centered, narrative, and trauma-informed design principles, this project contributes a novel, developmentally appropriate intervention that fosters empathy, autonomy, and open dialogue between children and caregivers in the digital age.
Keywords: Cyberbullying, Empathy Design, Parent-Child Communication, Narrative Design, Children’s Digital Safety, Personal Informatics, UX for Youth