Well-Being by Design Fellowship: Call for Applications

The Call for Applications period has closed. Please learn about our Fellows here!

 

The Cooney Center is excited to announce our new Well-being by Design Fellowship, supported by Pinterest. We invite applications from mid-career designers of kids’ technology and media who want to prioritize designing for well-being at early stages in the development process and are currently working on a project/product that can be workshopped throughout the fellowship period. This free program will involve interactive virtual sessions over four months, culminating in an in-person gathering at Sesame Workshop’s headquarters in New York City. 

Why now?

Globally, nearly two billion children are growing up in an increasingly digital world. We must therefore attend to children’s healthy development in digital spaces as we do in physical ones – to put the well-being of children first. We believe this work requires a collaborative effort to answer questions that are critical to the growing movement to design digital products and services that advance children’s best interests. 

At the same time, recent research has shown that industry professionals need more guidance to understand how to design with these goals in mind. One report showed that technology companies need to work toward a more nuanced and holistic definition of well-being when designing for youth. The authors also found that not prioritizing well-being at early design stages increases the difficulty of making changes later. While many industry professionals are doing their best, another study found that they think about well-being in many different ways – including safety, usability, learning, and meaningful interactions – which, taken together, can be overwhelming to design for.

With this fellowship, we aim to make children’s well-being a priority in the design of the digital world by (1) putting the voices of children at the center and (2) providing industry with the tools to prioritize children’s well-being in design. 

To better understand their current needs, we conducted informational interviews with a wide range of children’s technology and media industry professionals including design directors, UX researchers, and product leads. We used this information to design a fellowship experience that will address key themes and questions such as better understanding different well-being frameworks (example), how to measure well-being, and how to advocate for children’s well-being in product design. We hope to conclude the fellowship by sharing new design ideas that will improve the well-being of children and young people in digital spaces.

The deadline to apply for the 2024 Fellowship program was October 18, 2023.

Learn more about the program. And please share!