Global well-being is an HL-only Digital Society challenge topic about how digital systems intersect with large-scale, persistent issues affecting quality of life. It focuses on three prescribed areas for inquiry: local and global inequalities, changing populations, and the future of work.
The topic is not a general study of happiness or health. Instead, students investigate how digital systems affect people and communities within these three areas, including both impacts, effects that have already occurred, and implications, future opportunities and risks.
| Prescribed area | What an inquiry could examine |
|---|---|
| Local and global inequalities | How unequal access to digital systems affects economic opportunities, food security, healthcare, or public services. |
| Changing populations | How digital systems respond to population growth, ageing, youth demographics, or migration. |
| The future of work | How automation, platform work, and other digital systems affect employment, job security, meaningful work, and collective worker needs. |
Students must connect a challenge to a specific intervention, meaning an innovation involving digital systems that attempts to mitigate, intercede in, enhance, or resolve part of the challenge. For example, an inquiry might investigate how a named digital healthcare platform addresses unequal healthcare access, rather than discussing "health technology" generally.
The intervention should then be evaluated using relevant criteria such as equity, acceptability, cost, feasibility, innovation, and ethics. These criteria reveal trade-offs: a system may expand access but remain unaffordable, collect sensitive data, or exclude communities with limited connectivity.
A common misconception is that global well-being is a context studied by every Digital Society student. It is actually one of the three , although it can draw on shared contexts such as economic, health, social, and political contexts.
