The App Generation: identity, intimacy and imagination in the digital era

Professor Howard Gardner explores the challenges facing today's young people as they navigate three vital areas of adolescent life - identity, intimacy and imagination - in a digital world. How can we ensure that new technologies act as a springboard to greater creativity and higher aspiration?

Today’s young people have grown up almost totally immersed in digital media. But have we really begun to take full stock of the impact that living in the digital era has on young people’s creativity and aspirations?

Drawing upon a unique body of new research, father of the theory of multiple intelligences, Professor Howard Gardner explores the particular challenges facing today’s “App Generation” as they as they navigate three vital areas of adolescent life - identity, intimacy and imagination - in a digital world.

Addressing the areas in which digital technologies can both positively and negatively affect relationships, personal and creative growth, Gardner looks at how we might venture beyond the ways that apps are designed to be used, to ensure that technologies act as a springboard to greater creativity and higher aspiration.

Speaker: Howard Gardner, Hobbs professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and senior director of Harvard Project Zero.

Chair: Dr Jonathan Rowson, Director, RSA Social Brain Centre.

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