Celebrating Our Inaugural Well-Being by Design Fellows

In 2024, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center invited 10 professionals who design kids tech to join us for the inaugural Well-Being by Design Fellowship. The organizations that these fellows represent range from small startups to large, well-established companies; all of them share a passion for creating great digital experiences for young people. 

Throughout the fellowship, we met regularly as a learning community, workshopping ideas informed by well-being and child development frameworks and applying them to the fellows’ digital products for kids. We invited industry experts and young people to share their expertise and feedback with our fellows.  

Through this process, we learned how companies like Scratch and LEGO are applying frameworks such as RITEC and Playful by Design, considered how to measure well-being and make the business case for designing for positive outcomes, and explored how to include children and families in the design process to create inclusive and accessible products. 

We were thrilled to celebrate the conclusion of our time together in April. Each fellow shared the highlights of their experience and discussed how they have been inspired to incorporate these frameworks into their products as well as the role that the fellowship has played in their professional development journey. We are delighted to share their takeaways from this experience with you here. 

We are grateful to our funders, Pinterest and foundry10, for their support.

 

Javier Agüera Pandora’s Way	Franceli Cibrian Chapman University	Grace Collins Snowbright Studio	Taylor Davis iCivics
Kimberly Dowd Google	Melissa Gedney PBS Kids	Carissa Kang Roblox	Olivia Levenson Korchagin Global Tinker
Aatash Parikh Inkwire	Keeana S. Saxon, Esq. Kidogo Productions