Call for Applications: Well-Being by Design Fellowship 2025

The Call for Applications is now open through October 11, 2024. 

If you follow our work, you may have seen the incredible results produced by our inaugural cohort of Well-Being by Design Fellows. 

Building from the success of the first year of this program, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce a second year of the 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 product development process and are currently working on a project that can be workshopped throughout the fellowship period. This free program will involve interactive virtual sessions over five months, kicking off with an in-person gathering at Sesame Workshop’s headquarters in New York City and culminating in a virtual webinar to share our learnings. 

Why continue this work?

The first cohort of fellows told us that they found it extremely valuable to receive guidance on how to design for children’s well-being, to receive feedback on their products from our youth design team, and to learn together with and feel supported by a group of their peers. All of the fellows were able to make changes to their products and processes based on the learnings from the Fellowship and continue to apply what they have learned.

A recent study from Sesame Workshop and The Harris Poll highlights that children’s well-being continues to be top of mind for families.

According to the study, half of Americans describe the average American child as anxious. However, several ways to improve well-being for children surfaced from the survey. For example, 88% of respondents felt that children’s well-being would improve if they had the tools to be more resilient. And 84% of parents noted the importance of addressing emotional well-being from a young age and wished that they had been taught how to understand and manage emotions as a child.

The Cooney Center has chosen to focus on educating and empowering the designers of digital spaces to help to promote children’s resilience and emotional regulation as well as other factors that research has shown to contribute to children’s subjective well-being.

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. 

We designed the fellowship experience with information gleaned from 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 feedback to design a program 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 build on the ideas generated by previous fellows with new insights to improve the well-being of children and young people in digital spaces.

The deadline to apply for the 2025 Fellowship program is October 11, 2024.

Learn more about the program, and please share with your networks!