Introduction Human Development 2019;62:5–13 DOI: 10.1159/000496072 Introduction to Developmental Digital Technologies in Human History, Culture, and Well-Being Carol D. Lee a Colette Daiute b a Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA; b The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA This special issue is an outgrowth of the 2017 annual conference of the Jean Piaget Society. The theme of the conference was “Technologies and Human Develop- ment.” Two special issues are being published from the conference presentations. The first is in Cognitive Development. The papers in Cognitive Development focus on in- teractive uses of digital media – learning games and games among online collectives to facilitate cognitive restructuring in individuals and collectives. By contrast, the papers in this special issue focus on technologies that facilitate restructuring of social interactions among people, and in so doing provide supports for influencing devel- opmental issues around identity, around risk and resilience, and around building shared resources that support the development of communities, with special atten- tion to digital technologies. Beyond the relatively vague idea of “context,” these pa- pers offer structural concepts that capture modes of social organization around the collective and individual uses of technologies. These include the constructs of “his- tory” (Pea & Cole, this vol.), “healthy learning ecosystem” (Pinkard, this vol.), “de- sign-based learning” (Gutiérrez, Higgs, Lizárraga, & Rivero, this vol.), and “comput- er-assisted interviews” (Lawrence, Kaplan, & Dodds, this vol.). From the original planning of the conference, we consciously conceptualized technologies in the broad sense to include, but not to be limited to, digital tools. We conceptualized technologies as human creations that facilitate structuring of oppor- tunities to solve real-life problems. We view technologies as tools, influenced by Vy- gotsky (1978) and later interpretations by Wartofsky (1979) and Cole (1996), namely tools as both physical (e.g., hammers and shovels) and ideational (concepts, modes of reasoning). It is useful to note that language (whether oral or written) is a physical production, but whether oral or written, always embodies ideas and modes of reason- ing. Across literatures, the terms “artifacts,” “tools,” and “technologies” are employed with shared and differing significations. Wartofsky articulated three levels of artifacts or tools: primary, secondary, and tertiary. As discussed by Cole (1996), primary arti- Published online: March 22, 2019 Prof. Carol D. Lee School of Education and Social Policy Northwestern University, 2120 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 (USA) E-Mail cdlee @northwestern.edu © 2019 S. Karger AG, Basel www.karger.com/hde E-Mail karger@karger.com