Fusing Gratitude Journaling and Citizen Science: A Youth-Centered Co-Design Framework for Mental Well-Beingand Data Literacy

This paper presents a youth-centered co-design framework that combines Gratitude Journaling (GJ) and Citizen Science (CS) to explore new pathways for adolescent mental well-being and data literacy. Through a five-day workshop involving 85 Italian high school students, participants engaged in daily self-reflection and collaborative design sessions to ideate mobile app prototypes that express both personal and collective experiences of well-being. By integrating GJ as a prompt for emotional introspection and CS as a lens for shared data exploration, the process encouraged participants to frame their reflections as contributions to a broader community. The resulting prototypes illustrate how young people can link emotional awareness with design features such as mood tracking, gratitude prompts, and community visualizations. Based on this experience, we propose a replicable co-design workshop format that leverages positive psychology, participatory design, and civic engagement. This approach may help empower teenagers to interpret their emotional experiences, engage critically with well-being data, and co-create supportive digital tools.