The DesignX Fellowship
About The Fellowship
The DesignX Fellowship is a selective summer teaching fellowship for emerging designers who are ready to step into real creative leadership. Over six immersive weeks, Fellows lead studio classrooms enabling young K–12 makers bring bold ideas to life. It’s a fast-paced, challenging, joyful, and deeply rewarding experience — one that helps you grow you as a designer as much as it inspires the students you lead.
Fellows run weekly design studios in Fashion, Product, Toy, or Architecture Design. Each week, you guide a new cohort of students through the full design arc — inspiration → ideation → making → refining → completion — resulting in 12–16 finished garments, products, toys, or models.
Each summer centers on a unifying theme (previous years: Nature’s Elements, Human Emotions, Human Senses), with weekly subthemes that spark observation, creativity, and reflection. The work is highly collaborative, deeply tactile, and intentionally rooted in real materials and human connection.
Who It’s For
The 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 show up with enthusiasm.
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.
Why This Fellowship Is Unique
The DesignX Fellowship offers emerging designers an experience that few traditional early-career roles match: the chance to lead a design studio, guide real creative work, and shape the development of human creativity at its earliest and most imaginative stage.
You are demonstrating techniques, coaching students through design challenges, troubleshooting in real time, encouraging risk-taking, and bringing a new collection of physical products to life each week. The pace is fast, the responsibility is real, and the impact is immediate. You see your impact in dozens of completed projects — and in the confidence of the young designers who created them.
Real studio responsibility: Fellows lead or support studio classrooms with meaningful ownership of outcomes — backed by a teaching team and senior leadership.
Joyful, high-energy environment: Each week is filled with curiosity, experimentation, humor, breakthroughs, and the uniquely inspiring imagination of young makers.
Rigorous training & mentorship: A comprehensive pre-summer training program and continuous support ensure Fellows feel prepared from day one.
Accelerated creative growth: With a new cohort every week, you refine systems, demos, and problem-solving approaches at a rapid pace.
Deep creative inspiration: Students will challenge you, surprise you, and reconnect you to the raw creativity that drew you to design in the first place.
Professional credibility: Industry leaders recognize the rigor of this experience — Fellows stand out for their maturity, adaptability, and leadership.
Why This Work Matters, Now
We are living in a moment when human creativity is becoming both more essential and endangered. As AI, automation, and digitization accelerate, the qualities that set us apart — imagination, intuition, presence, craftsmanship, emotional intelligence — must be cultivated with intention.
DesignX champions a human-first response to this shift.
As a Fellow, you have the rare opportunity to nurture creativity at its most raw and unconditioned — in young people who are still deeply curious, open, and fearless. You shape how they understand design, how they see themselves as makers, and how they experience the physical world.
This is your chance to cultivate the qualities that you know matter most for our future: hands-on making, critical thinking, presence, empathy, originality, and the ability to bring meaningful ideas into the world.
Real teaching and creative leadership experience
Strengthened craft and technical skills through continuous hands-on making
Confidence in communication, facilitation, and decision-making
A vibrant creative community and network of peers
A portfolio that demonstrates process, systems thinking, and creative leadership
A deeper understanding of how design education shapes human creativity
Competitive pay
What Fellows Gain
Apply to the 2026 Fellowship
If you’re excited by challenge, energized by young makers, and ready for an intense, joyful, hands-on summer of creative growth, we encourage you to apply.
Creative Lead Fellows
Eligibility: Graduating Seniors, Graduate Students, Alumni
Deadline: Round 2 - Mar 30th 2026Fashion Design
Toy Design
Architecture
Product Design
Creative Assistant Fellows
Eligibility: Rising Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors
Deadline: Round 2 - Mar 30th 2026All Design Studios
Creative Assistant Junior
Eligibility: High School Juniors & Seniors
Deadline: Round 2 - Mar 30th 2026All Design Studios
Creative Assistant In-Training
Eligibility: High School Freshmen & Sophomores
Deadline: Mar 30th 2026All Design Studios