Tag Archives: design

Where were all the influential tech and media companies hanging out in early March? They were all at SXSW 2023— and so was the Cooney Center! We’re back from an amazing few days of hanging out in Austin with innovators who are shaping our future, and are thrilled to share some of our highlights from an incredible few days here. With two panels and a very popular LEGO Play Lounge during the conference’s Design Track, the Cooney Center, in collaboration…

Educational media for children should be designed to ensure learning is meaningful and playful. Children should actively engage with content, connect material to what matters to them, and have a joyful and social experience.1  However, research shows that many apps are not designed in ways that support these and other research-based principles.2 One way to ensure that new technologies meet children’s needs is to involve them in the design process. Allison Druin, a leader in the Cooperative Inquiry field and…

What does well-being for children in the digital age look like? A growing movement acknowledges that it’s not enough to worry about technology’s potential harm to children; it is time to be more intentional about designing for positive outcomes. How can we design digital experiences that allow children to learn emotional regulation, develop competence and creativity, feel empowered and self-actualized, and connect with others in a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment while keeping them safe? We will discuss recent research…

On Friday, March 24, the Cooney Center’s Senior Director of Research Medha Tare will moderate Designing for Digital Well-being: Frameworks for Optimizing Positive Media Experiences for Children and Families, a roundtable at SRCD 2023 in Salt Lake City. Panelists include Amanda LaTasha Armstrong, New Mexico State University and New America; Bruce Homer, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Remi Torres, University of California, Los Angeles; Sesame Workshop; and Jason Yip, University of Washington, Seattle.  This conversational roundtable brings…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is excited to join forces with Riot Games, IDEO, and the Fair Play Alliance to announce the “The Designing for Digital Thriving Challenge.” Co-hosted by Riot and IDEO, the Challenge is inspired by the work that the Fair Play Alliance (FPA) and the Cooney Center are doing to establish “Digital Thriving,” a field-initiated approach to building healthy interactions and resilient communities in online game spaces.  The FPA and Joan Ganz Cooney Center define digital thriving…

On September 8, 2022, The Children’s Media Association Bay Area Chapter hosted a virtual event featuring the Playtest with Kids toolkit. The free interactive resource from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center features methods and case studies to help teams get actionable insights when playtesting their products with children. Moderated by Lori Takeuchi (Vice President of the Children’s Media Association of the Bay Area), the panel featured Courtney Wong Chin (Noggin), Robert Tom Kalinowski (Age of Learning), Sharon Rylander (Square Panda),…

When we design for children, we design both for the present and for the future. Childhood experiences have an impact on children, which translates into long-term effects on the population and society—our collective future. Excluding children from our thinking is a systemic bias and we work to change that.  Designing for Children’s Rights (D4CR) is a global non-profit association, working in collaboration with UNICEF to create awareness about the importance of keeping children’s rights in mind when building products and…

Augmented reality (AR) allows users to see and interact with virtual objects while still seeing their environment. AR is increasingly becoming more common and is being applied to gaming, healthcare, and education. For example, if you have ever played the worldwide phenomenon Pokémon Go, then you have used an AR application, with which you saw and collected virtual Pokémon in your environment. AR applications can be created for a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, as well as headsets. Compared…

2021 set off alarm bells for big tech when the courageous whistle-blowers Frances Haugen, Sophie Zhang, and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa made front-page news of irresponsible design of technology – an issue that’s also demonstrated by 5Right’s extensive research. The digital world is entirely human-made: designers, engineers, and rule-makers can imagine and design the digital world so that children are protected from harm and their rights are upheld. A pioneering new standard shows how. Many policymakers, civil society organizations,…

This week marks the introduction of Sago Mini Boxes, a new service to promote play-based learning at home. It’s a major milestone for our team, and one that is rooted in many of the ideas of innovators such as Joan Ganz Cooney. So how did a team best known for preschool apps come to develop a physical box service? The Sago Mini apps are really the outcome of two big ideas which underlie all of our work. The first is…