NEW YORK, NY.- PawPal, a digital platform designed to transform how families learn and explore together, has been named a Silver Winner in Digital Design at the Indigo Design Award. The recognition highlights PawPal’s innovative approach to integrating artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and user-centered design into a cohesive, scalable experience for both children and parents.
Created by UX and product designer Jiani Lin, PawPal reimagines family travel as an opportunity for meaningful learning and engagement. The app addresses a common challenge faced by families: while travel offers significant educational value, keeping children consistently engaged throughout the experience can be difficult. Research shows that many parents struggle to maintain children’s attention during trips, even as travel continues to play an important role in cognitive and cultural development.
Rather than approaching this challenge as a single-feature product, Lin designed PawPal as a scalable experience system serving two audiences at once. Children engage through voice-first storytelling, AI-guided companions, and immersive augmented reality overlays that bring historical and cultural moments to life in real-world locations. Parents, meanwhile, are given a parallel interface to manage preferences, monitor progress, and maintain oversight. This dual-layered design balances child engagement with parental trust—an increasingly important challenge in AI-enabled consumer products.
At the core of PawPal’s design is a modular framework that enables the experience to scale across different environments, cultures, and age groups. Augmented reality overlays provide contextual learning within real-world locations, while AI companions adapt content delivery to be age-appropriate and engaging. A voice-first interface reduces friction for younger users and supports accessibility for non-readers, while visual cues and simplified interactions accommodate a wider range of learning styles.
Accessibility and user trust are built into the foundation of the platform. PawPal incorporates parental controls, transparent data practices, and safety-focused interaction patterns to ensure that the use of AI remains responsible and understandable. Rather than treating these considerations as secondary, the design integrates them into the overall system, reflecting a broader shift toward more accountable digital product development.
The Indigo Design Award is an international competition recognizing innovative work across design disciplines, attracting submissions from over 69 countries and evaluated by an international jury of leading creative professionals and design leaders. PawPal’s recognition as a Silver Winner in Digital Design reflects not only the quality of its interface and interactions, but also its ability to address a real-world behavioral challenge through a structured and scalable design approach.
For Lin, PawPal reflects a broader design philosophy that has shaped her work across enterprise UX, design systems, and emerging technology: digital products should simplify complexity, build trust, and create meaningful engagement at scale. By combining travel, education, AI, and augmented reality, PawPal points toward a future in which technology does not replace human connection, but deepens shared learning and exploration across generations.
