The DesignX Fellowship
A summer teaching fellowship for emerging designers who are ready to step into real creative leadership.
About The FellowshipThe DesignX Fellowship is a six week immersive experience with Fellows leading studio-based design classrooms where young makers bring ideas into form through hands-on making. The experience is fast-paced, challenging, and deeply rewarding—designed to stretch you as a designer, educator, and studio leader while inspiring the students you guide.
Fellows run weekly design studios in Fashion, Product, Toy, or Architectural Design. Each week, you lead a cohort of students through the full design arc—from inspiration and ideation to making, refinement, and completion—resulting in over 80 one-of-a-kind garments, products, toys, or architectural models. The work is real, the outcomes are tangible, and the responsibility is meaningful.
Studios are shaped around thoughtful themes that invite reflection on the world and the moment we’re living in. These themes spark curiosity, creativity, and empathy, while grounding design work in context and intention. The studio experience is highly collaborative, deeply tactile, and rooted in real materials, sustained practice, and human connection—offering Fellows a rare opportunity to lead creative work and see its impact unfold each day.
Who It’s ForThe Fellowship is for ambitious early-career designers — undergraduates, recent grads, and emerging professionals — who want to develop as leaders, educators, and creatives. We look for skilled designers who are organized, responsible, systems-minded, and deeply committed to craft, but also joyful, patient, and ready to share their enthusiasm with the younger generation.
This is not a 9–5 pixel-pushing desk job. Fellows are on their feet, guiding students through physical making projects every day, adapting to challenges as they arise, and maintaining a high standard of craft. Those who thrive are prepared, proactive, and eager to bring energy to the studio environment.
Your students will humor you, challenge you, and inspire you. You’ll offer them the opportunity you wish you had when you were their age — and in doing so, you become a stronger, more compassionate, more capable designer yourself.
Top design universities — including RISD, Parsons, and CMU — and design industry professionals recognize the DesignX Fellowship as a meaningful training ground that develops designers with depth, discipline, communication skills, and leadership capacity.
What Fellows GainThe DesignX Fellowship offers emerging designers a leadership experience that few traditional early-career roles match: the chance to lead a design studio, guide creative work, and shape the development of human creativity at its earliest and most imaginative stage.
As a Lead Fellow you inspire budding designers, demonstrate techniques, coach students through open-ended design problems, troubleshoot in real time, and bring a new body of physical work to completion each week. The pace is fast, expectations are high, and ownership is real. Your impact is visible in both the quality of finished work and the confidence of the students you lead. You gain:
A deeper relationship to your own making
Teaching sharpens practice. As you demonstrate techniques, guide process, and solve problems in real time, your hands, judgment, and sensitivity to materials grow stronger.Real experience leading a studio
You take responsibility for a creative space—setting tone, guiding work through uncertainty, and helping ideas move from concept to completion with care and intention.The chance to mentor young designers at a formative moment
You support students as they take risks, work through challenges, and discover the confidence that comes from finishing something real.A community of designers who value craft and care
Work alongside Fellows who share a commitment to thoughtful physical making, sustained attention, and human-first creativity—building relationships that extend beyond the summer.High-Value Coaching, Mentorship & Certification
Receive immersive training, ongoing coaching, and guidance from senior leaders—strengthening your teaching practice and earning DesignX certification grounded in rigor and care.A clearer understanding of how creativity develops
By watching ideas take shape day after day, you gain insight into how imagination, judgment, and confidence are built—through effort, iteration, and completion.
Why This Work Matters, NowCreativity is one of the most powerful human capacities—and it must be actively cultivated. In a rapidly changing world, imagination, judgment, craftsmanship, and empathy are not extras; they are essential.
DesignX exists to protect and grow these capacities. By working at a human scale, through physical making and sustained attention, we give creativity the conditions it needs to take root, grow into form, and endure.
As a Fellow, you step into this work at a critical moment. You shape how young makers learn to think, make, and see themselves as designers—through effort, iteration, and completion.
This is more than a fellowship. It’s a chance to help build a future grounded in creative intelligence, care, and human agency—one studio, one student, one finished piece at a time.
Apply to the 2026 Fellowship
If you’re excited by challenge, energized by young makers, and ready for an intense, fun, hands-on summer of creative growth, we encourage you to apply.
Lead Fellows
Eligibility: Graduating College Seniors, Graduate Students, Young Design Professionals
Summer 2026 applications now open. Deadline Mar 31st 2025Fashion Design
Soft Toy Design
Architecture
Wood Toy Design
Senior Assistants
Eligibility: College Freshmen, Sophomores & Juniors
Summer 2026 applications now open. Deadline Mar 31st 2025All Design Studios
Junior Assistants
Eligibility: Rising High School Juniors & Seniors
Summer 2026 applications now open. Deadline Mar 31st 2025All Design Studios
Assistants-In-Training
Eligibility: DesignX Alumni (Rising High School Freshmen & Sophomores)
Summer 2026 applications now open. Deadline Mar 31st 2025All Design Studios