Redefining the influence of tech for Gen Alpha: Listening to the next generation
Today’s kids are digital natives, but even they know something’s broken. HMD’s latest research reveals what young people themselves want from technology —and how this aligns with parents' fears and hopes.
This panel brings together youth advocates, educators, and digital wellbeing experts to decode these findings and explore the next frontier of tech design. How do we reduce screen addiction without alienating kids? Can tech products make young people feel safer instead of more vulnerable?
Join the discussion to learn how listening, bold moves, and cross-generational collaboration are shaping a new kind of technology—one that puts young minds first.
Adam Ferguson is big into understanding people’s problems and tearing up norms until a solution presents itself. He has spent his career matching global trends and individuals’ needs with products and services purpose built to help. At HMD he is responsible for the balance between Insights, Propositions and Product Marketing.
Over the last 18 months Adam and his teams at HMD have been on a journey to understand the needs and experiences of younger tech users and how these sit alongside the hopes and fears of their parents. It’s clear the smartphone landscape needs to change, and the path to that change comes by listening. In this case, listening to more than 35,000 parents and kids who have revealed what they want when it comes to their own relationships with tech and from the phones of the future.
This isn’t the first time Adam and HMD have taken on an industry spanning challenge. They are also actively engaged in changing the industry’s approach to eWaste by designing repairability into smartphones of all price points. To this end Adam is a member of the Circular Design Forum and in 2024 contributed to their Circular Electronics Design Guide, a joint venture with Accenture and the CEP which aims to help with the embedding of circularity into design. In 2025 he’ll be speaking at London Climate Action Week.
Dr Becky Foljambe is an NHS GP with an extra qualification in Sexual and Reproductive Health. She is founder of Health Professionals for Safer Screens and a passionate campaigner for safer devices and device use for children and for improved education for families around the impacts of devices on whole-child health.
Becky also has serious concerns about health misinformation that young people are accessing online, particularly via social media, that is influencing important health choices such as a young woman choosing not to take contraception after watching misleading Tik Tok content.
Cathy is a senior global communications leader at Human Mobile Devices (HMD), where she’s helping reimagine what safer, more mindful smartphones can look like—especially for children and teens. A driving force behind HMD’s community-led Better Phone Project, she has worked with families, experts, and product teams around the world to design tech that grows with young users, not overwhelms them.
A proud mum of two, Cathy is right at the heart of this conversation—both professionally and personally. With one child on the cusp of their first phone, it’s a topic that dominates chats at the school gates and inspires much of her work. She’s passionate about helping parents make informed, confident choices when introducing tech into family life.
Jess Butcher MBE is the CEO and founder of ‘Scroll Aware’ - a social enterprise spreading a positive, antidote-focussed ‘Less Scroll, More Soul’ message around the world with an ambitious mission to shift societal perceptions around measurably rebalancing the two.
She built her career as an award-winning consumer-tech entrepreneur (Fortune’s Most Powerful Female Entrepreneurs, BBC 100 Women, Europe’s Top 50 Inspiring Women in Tech, 3x TedX speaker and MBE recipient) and for the last four years sat on the board of the EHRC (the regulator for the UK Equality Act). In recent years she has turned her back on her previous trade as a result of deep research into the negative societal impact of the rise of the attention (aka ‘addiction’) economy which now robs the average person of up to 5 hrs/ day of their life and resulted in the effective-extinction of boredom, focus and perspective. In her various activities, she has collaborated with Professor Jonathan Haidt, and many other prominent voices and politicians around this subject.
She speaks compellingly and irreverently on her journey to this mission and her plans for the movement and how best to shift tech habits, displaying knowledgeable insight into the plethora of other societal trends impacted by the rise of infinite scroll - from the rise of overwhelm, anxiety and negativity to ideological polarisation, declining communities and child mental health.