The 2025 WBxD Fellows Take Their Show on the Road
What did our 2025 Well-Being by Design Fellows learn about designing tech with kids’ well-being in mind? A lot, it turns out!
During the intensive five-month program, the 12 mid-career designers were exposed to the perspectives of research and industry guest speakers, the sometimes very honest opinions of the teens on our youth design team, advice from 2024 WBxD Fellows, and most of all, the deep expertise of their fellow fellows.
The Cooney Center was thrilled to celebrate the conclusion of the 2025 Well-Being by Design Fellowship with an inspiring webinar in May. Over 130 attendees engaged by commenting on the design insights shared by the fellows and asking specific questions on how to tackle the challenges of designing positive digital experiences for kids.
Each fellow shared the highlights of their journey and provided examples of how they are planning to incorporate design features aligned to frameworks such as RITEC and Playful by Design into their products.
Their learnings and takeaways from this experience are compiled in our recently published case studies, which include specific changes that each fellow plans to make in their work to improve well-being outcomes for children.
At Games for Change 2025. From L-R: Noelle Posadas Shang, Rubin Soodak, Jen Chiou, Medha Tare, Sunny Williams, Sarah Jacobstein, Danny Pimentel, Allisyn Levy and Sunny William
Since wrapping up the program, the 2025 fellows have already been taking their knowledge and experience out into the field by collaborating with each other, sharing their learnings back to their colleagues, and participating in conferences.
Last month, Jen Chiou, Danny Pimentel, Noelle Posadas Shang, Rubin Soodak and Sunny Williams joined the Cooney Center’s “Playing with Well-Being by Design” workshop at the 2025 Games for Change Festival where they discussed how they are thinking about designing for well-being and then helped attendees go through a RITEC audit exercise.
There are plans in the works for several other conference collaborations in the coming months.
We are very excited to announce that the application process for the 2026 Well-Being by Design Fellowship will kick off in the fall. Stay tuned for more details.
We are grateful to our funders, Pinterest, foundry10, and Google.org, for their support of this initiative.
Video from the Playing with Well-Being by Design workshop at the 2025 Games for Change Festival:
