Kind computing

Kindness can boost happiness and wellbeing. It can benefit individuals (e.g., increasing resilience) as well as society (e.g., increasing trust). With digital technology permeating our daily lives, there are increasing opportunities for such technology to enable, mediate, and amplify kindness in society. In this paper, we propose kind computing, a new computing paradigm that explicitly incorporates kindness into the development and use of digital technology. We envisage software engineering as a discipline that can deliver such technology. However, software engineering techniques do not provide explicit abstractions, formalisms, and tools to consider, analyse, and implement software that delivers such technology. With reference to related work, we elaborate on kind computing and the role of software engineering in enabling it, identify open research challenges, elicit three categories of kind computing requirements, and sketch a research agenda for future work.