Meet the Founder
Designing for childhood, one question at a time.
Kanika Kohli is a UX researcher and design strategist with over 15 years of experience designing human-centred digital products, services and systems.
As a young parent, she found herself turning the same lens she had used throughout her career toward a much more personal question:
What does a child really need in the first few years of life?
The more she observed, researched and learned, the more she began to question the world we were creating around childhood - an environment increasingly shaped by screens, structured activities, overstimulation and prescriptive toys that often tell children exactly what to do.
From question to model
This exploration led to SKETCH.
A child-led early learning model that reimagines the early years by placing development before performance and creating space for open-ended play, movement, imagination, emotional safety, language-rich experiences and nature-rooted rhythms.
But one question stayed with her:
How can we use SKETCH to empower young parents and nurture children at scale? She began looking beyond the classroom - at the everyday environments, objects and experiences that shape a child’s early years.
And that became CogKnit.
a way to bring the principles of SKETCH into the hands of children and families, through simple, tactile objects designed to leave room for curiosity, imagination and independent play.
From research to making
CogKnit brings Kanika's design practice into the everyday world of childhood - creating open-ended play companions that invite children to explore rather than instruct them, and to imagine rather than consume.
Her work draws from design research, developmental psychology, systems thinking, neuroscience and conscious education, but begins with something much simpler:
watching children.
- Watching how they pick something up.
- How they turn it into something unexpected.
- How a simple object can become a world.
- How deeply they learn when they are free to discover for themselves.
- What everyday objects catch their attention the most.
A different way of designing for childhood
Kanika believes that good design doesn't always need to add more.
Sometimes, it needs to leave something out - the instructions, the predetermined outcome, the flashing lights, the constant novelty - so that the child has room to bring something of their own.
We make the object.
The child makes the meaning.
CogKnit is her attempt to bring that belief into the hands of children and into the hands of the mothers, makers and families who shape their everyday childhoods.
For Kanika, CogKnit is not simply a toy brand.
It is a continuation of a question she has been exploring through her work:
What kind of world do we want to create around a child while they are learning what it means to be in the world?
And perhaps, it begins with something as small as what we place in their little hands.