What is Digital Wellbeing? A Leverage Points Framework to Guide Research and Action

While research on digital wellbeing has often focused on mitigating the harms of technology (over)use-especially around screen time-the concept itself remains inconsistently defined. In this paper, we first propose a layered taxonomy that characterizes digital wellbeing across three dimensions: technology scope and users, mediators, and strategies. The taxonomy is grounded in a review of ten years of CHI publications and refined through its application to 68 student projects on digital wellbeing. Building on this foundation, we then advance the Leverage Points for Digital Wellbeing, a framework inspired by system thinking that situates interventions along self-oriented, collective, and systemic orientations of change. Our conceptual model provides an actionable account of digital wellbeing-one that captures users' evolving entanglements with technology, including generative AI, as well as the broader social and political conditions in which these entanglements unfold. We conclude by outlining implications for research, design, and policy.