This paper presents a generative approach to interdisciplinary collaboration based on generic epistemology. Informed by the work of philosopher Anne-Françoise Schmid, we introduce the concept of the integrative object as a means to reorient interdisciplinary collaboration toward the requirements of the object of research itself, rather than via the requirements of particular disciplinary languages, methods, or operative logics. We show how such an approach is useful for research into sociotechnical phenomena that exceed the boundaries of discrete disciplines and their convergence. We introduce digital well-being as a case study, drawing on the authors’ own interdisciplinary collaborative experiences in this area as its empirical matter. From this, and in order to aid future research into similarly complex sociotechnical objects, we then provide practical tools to help those in the HCI community prepare and conduct interdisciplinary research in a similarly generative, non-dogmatic, and non-hierarchical manner.

The psychological costs of the attention economy are often considered through the binary of harmful design and healthy use, with digital well-being chiefly characterised as a matter of personal responsibility. This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the empirical, ideological, and political limits of embedding this individualised perspective in computational discourses and designs of digital well-being measurement. We will reveal well-being to be a culturally specific and environmentally conditioned concept and will problematize user engagement as a universal proxy for well-being. Instead, the contributing factors of user well-being will be located in environing social, cultural, and political conditions far beyond the control of individual users alone. In doing so, we hope to reinvigorate the issue of digital well-being measurement as a nexus point of political concern, through which multiple disciplines can study experiences of digital ill as symptomatic of wider social inequalities and (capitalist) relations of power.