Announcing the Winners of the TITAN Critically Yours Design Challenge
- TITAN
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
We are excited to announce the winners of the TITAN “Critically Yours” Design Challenge, a global call to young designers and creative technologists to imagine new ways of helping citizens build critical thinking skills and recognise disinformation in everyday life.
The challenge invited students, recent graduates, and young professionals to explore how design, interactivity, and storytelling can make complex ideas around tackling disinformation with critical thinking more intuitive and engaging. The response exceeded our expectations, with submissions coming from across Europe, India, and the United States.
Today, we are proud to present two winners, each offering a distinct yet complementary vision for how citizens can learn to think critically in a world saturated with digital information.
🥇 Winner 1: Filtered Realities
By: Soni Sakshi & Haripriya Dabbiru (National Institute of Design, India)
Filtered Realities” is an interactive experience that allows users to toggle between manipulated and accurate versions of the same news event. By revealing how framing, emotion, and selective editing shape our perception, the concept makes the invisible mechanisms of manipulation visible.
The project aligns beautifully with TITAN’s goal of helping people recognise disinformation not by telling them what is true, but by showing them how information can be distorted, and empowering them to question the story behind the story.
This prototype impressed the jury for its clarity, strong pedagogical value, and potential integration with TITAN’s micro-lessons and disinformation signal models.
🥇 Winner 2: One Minute
By: Qin Longyue (Ohio State University)
One Minute is a minimal, poetic, and powerful digital reflection space where users are invited to take just 60 seconds to think critically before reacting to a piece of online content. Through multimodal cues and Socratic questions, the experience prompts citizens to slow down, countering the fast-scrolling habits that make people more vulnerable to disinformation.
The concept frames critical thinking as an intentional act, not an abstract skill. It also opens a creative pathway for integrating TITAN’s Socratic chatbot into moments of everyday media consumption.
The jury praised this submission for its conceptual clarity, emotional resonance, and real-world applicability in educational and community settings.
Why These Design Challenge Results Matter
Both winning concepts reflect the heart of TITAN’s mission: to help people think more deeply, question more confidently, and recognise manipulation when they see it.
They also demonstrate how design can support media literacy by:
Making abstract ideas tangible,
Encouraging playful exploration,
Supporting emotional and cognitive reflection,
Building pathways for responsible digital engagement.
These winning ideas will inspire future developments in our platform’s interactive and visual components.
Thank You to All Participants
We want to extend a warm thank-you to every student, designer, facilitator, mentor, and institution who helped make this challenge a success. The creativity and insight shown in the submissions reaffirm the importance of involving young minds in reimagining how we confront disinformation.
We also thank our jury members, who brought expertise from design, AI, education, and media literacy to the evaluation process.
Discover the Winners, Honourable Mentions, and Explore Their Prototypes & Videos
Visit our showcase page to see the winning videos, concepts, and prototypes from both winners, as well as videos from the teams awarded special mentions:
And learn more about the challenge itself here: