It is with a profound sense of humility and gratitude that I find myself in a position to announce my first major award as a tenure-track Computer Science professor at the Colorado School of Mines. I have received a $260,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation titled “Expanding Models of Delivery for Online Spiritual Care.” (Description here: https://www.templeton.org/grant/expanding-models-of-delivery-for-online-spiritual-care.) The competition was fierce, with only 6.2% of nearly 3000 online funding inquiries receiving an invite to submit a full proposal. Consequently, as with many other moments in my life, it seems that the universe has conspired against the odds to support my research at the intersection of human spirituality and design. I feel deeply honored to have received this opportunity early in my career, and I am incredibly excited to put my team to work and continue expanding toward new frontiers in Human-Computer Interaction.
Over the next three years, this grant will fund members of my new research lab in a first-of-its-kind investigation of how to design Online Spiritual Care Communities. (For more information, see this brief Interactions article on Computational Spiritual Support.) Using existing support communities on Reddit as demonstration sites for ideation and reflection (e.g., r/Depression, r/Anxiety, r/Cancer, r/SuicideWatch), we will be conducting design studies with professional spiritual care providers such as chaplains, spiritual directors, and leaders of religious and spiritual communities who tend to the spiritual needs of their community members. This research précis includes more details on our methods (including user testing sessions and interviews, design workshops, and a national survey), and the figure below depicts the “Theory of Change” we hope to accomplish in this work.
We are now recruiting professional spiritual care providers for in-person user testing sessions locally in the Denver Metropolitan Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York City. I warmly welcome inquiries and referrals for participants in this research!
I will close with a short essay that I wrote as part of the grant application which, I believe, is a wonderful articulation of my hopes and passions as a researcher, professor, and compassionate human with big dreams of healing and peace for all of us in this difficult, chaotic world. The John Templeton Foundation asks that PIs share which “Big Question” their work will address. Here’s my response!
What Big Question will this work address?
In 1996, an essay by Michel Bauwens titled “Spirituality and Technology: Exploring the Relationship” was published in a brand new journal, First Monday, which focused its content exclusively on the Internet–a phenomenal new advancement in technology that promised to revolutionize human society and information systems. Bauwens described two prevailing but opposing attitudes at the time. On the one hand, enthused users shared a zeitgeist of excitement and endless potential—surely, the Internet would enable humanity to share information globally and instantaneously, transcending all prior limits and bringing about a revolution in human consciousness and spiritual unity. On the other hand, opposing groups decried the evils of the Internet—such technology was unnatural and would drive humanity apart from Nature and God by distracting us from what truly brings meaning to life. These early perspectives raised a Big Question:
Will the Internet bring us closer together or will it tear us farther apart?
Following explosive growth since the 90s, we now know that the Internet has caused both positive and negative impacts on the health of society and individuals. Social media platforms, in particular, have enabled massive scales of real-time information-sharing, but this brings with it information overload and the easeful spread of misinformation. Online communities can help people feel connected both with people they know in real life and with untold masses of anonymous strangers. Yet they can also harbor toxic, abusive, hate groups, generate overly positive or inauthentic perceptions of who people really are, and hold users captive to addictive, mindless, or dissociation-inducing content feeds. It is clear that social media has both brought us together and torn us apart, and that use of these platforms has become inextricable to how billions of humans now socialize, work, and play.
The dynamic landscape of social media platforms continues to evolve as new companies emerge and older ones fade, with each new iteration vying for our attention and our content via new user interfaces, media formats, interaction patterns, and types of online communities. Yet none of today’s major social media platforms have been overtly designed with a focus on the spiritual wellness of users. Likewise, except for a small handful of seminal papers, the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has also historically shied away from considerations of spirituality and religion as a focal design element. Therefore, we argue that today’s Big Question must become:
How can we intentionally re-design social media to foster the spiritual healing and thriving of humanity, rather than perpetuating a status quo of increasing fragmentation, polarization, manipulation, and abuse?
In order to investigate this Big Question, we adopt a transdisciplinary approach that will help HCI researchers, computer scientists, and technology designers develop new research paradigms and pragmatic design principles for Computational Spiritual Support through co-design activities with professional spiritual care providers. We selected the platform Reddit.com as a provocative study site, given the extreme diversity of pro- and anti-social communities that it hosts. Yet our results will provide foundational new insights on how to design spiritually healthy online spaces across the spectrum of sociotechnical platforms that host online communities—both now and in the future. Ultimately, these results will enable the expansion of models of delivery for spiritual care to include online spaces where patients and caregivers now seek and exchange support during life-threatening illness.
Thanks for reading. 
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss or participate in this research!
C. Estelle Smith, Ph.D. 