Ila Kumar does not believe that technology should be handed down to communities like a finished product from on high. Instead, she has built a doctoral research career around the idea that the most impactful digital tools are those designed with the people who will use them—not for them. Working at the intersection of computer science, mental health, and child welfare, Kumar is rethinking the entire pipeline of technology creation, moving from a model of “tech for good” to one of “tech with community.” Her work challenges the binary view that technology must be either embraced wholesale or rejected outright, arguing instead for a more nuanced, participatory approach that centers the lived experiences of young people, especially those navigating trauma and the foster care system.
From “Tech for Good” to Community-Based Design: Tracing Ila Kumar’s Evolution
Before her graduate studies at MIT, Kumar grew up in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked on several projects at the intersection of technology and mental health or psychology research. These early experiences were formative, exposing her to the potential of digital tools to support emotional well-being. But they also planted a seed of doubt. “I had done a number of projects that were ‘tech for good,'” Kumar recalls. “And I wasn’t seeing that what I was doing had a long-term impact.” This realization did not lead her to abandon technology. Instead, it prompted a fundamental rethinking of how technology is created. “If we design technology in community-based ways and really think about holistic well-being,” she says, “maybe we can actually create things that help people.”
That conviction became the bedrock of her PhD research at MIT. Over the course of her doctoral work, Kumar has shifted from simply listening to communities to actively building with them. This is not a subtle distinction; it represents a fundamental change in the power dynamics of technology development. The traditional model often sees researchers and engineers as the experts who design solutions for passive recipients. Kumar’s model inverts this, positioning the community—particularly young people and the caregivers who support them—as co-designers with genuine agency over the tools that are meant to serve them.
The Collage App: Redesigning Emotional Expression for Youth Impacted by Trauma
One of the most concrete examples of Kumar’s approach is a project developed in partnership with Stepping Forward LA, an organization that supports young people impacted by the child welfare system. The goal was to create a digital tool that could help these young people express emotions that are difficult to articulate. Traditional text-heavy communication interfaces, common in mental health apps, often fall short for youth who have experienced trauma. Words can be insufficient, overwhelming, or even re-traumatizing.
Kumar and her team replaced text with a visual collage system. The app allows users to combine images, colors, and shapes to represent how they are feeling and what they are experiencing. This visual mode of communication is designed to lower the barrier to emotional expression, making it accessible even when words fail. More importantly, the app was developed with the direct input of the young people who would use it. Their perspectives shaped the design, the functionality, and the overall experience. The result is a tool that does not impose a vocabulary of emotion but rather provides a flexible medium for personal, non-verbal storytelling. The goal extends beyond individual expression: the app also aims to build a sense of connectedness among users, fostering a shared space where young people navigating similar challenges can recognize one another’s experiences.
This project illustrates a core principle of Kumar’s work: that design must be trauma-informed. A trauma-informed approach recognizes the prevalence and impact of trauma and seeks to avoid re-traumatization through insensitive design choices. A text-heavy interface that requires precise emotional labeling can feel like a test, a demand for a performance of insight that a young person may not be ready to give. A collage-based interface, by contrast, offers a gentler, more open-ended path to self-expression.
Co-Designing Treatment Planning: Giving Youth Agency in Their Own Care
In an ongoing project, Kumar is collaborating with the Justice Resource Institute (JRI), a nonprofit that provides a wide range of services to children, adults, and families, including those involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Together, they are designing a mobile app that supports youth in playing an active role in their own treatment-planning process. The app is not simply a digital version of a paper form; it is a tool designed to help young people articulate their own goals and track their progress outside the therapy office.
The group is working closely with clinicians and youth to design and evaluate the system. The iterative, participatory process ensures that the app addresses real needs rather than theoretical assumptions. For example, the design team might learn from a clinician that the best time for a young person to set a weekly goal is not during a therapy session but right after a positive interaction at school, or from a youth that tracking progress via simple visual cues feels more empowering than writing journal entries. The app is being built to plug into existing systems of care, not to replace them. It is designed to work with the rhythms of therapy, not against them.
This project embodies Kumar’s insistence on a collaborative design process. “We are not sitting at MIT designing tools and just throwing them at people,” she says. “We’re designing it together. We need to actually have the folks that are relevant to providing the care in the room.” The statement is a direct challenge to the “ivory tower” model of technology development, where the end user is an abstraction rather than a collaborator.
What Is the “Technology Leadership Circle” and Why Does It Matter?
Kumar’s commitment to co-design extends beyond individual app development. She co-facilitated a 10-month technology leadership circle in partnership with Foster America, an organization that works to transform public child welfare systems. The program brought together two groups that rarely interact in a structured, collaborative setting: people with lived experience of foster care and technology experts. The goal was to envision how digital technologies could fill gaps in care for young people in the child welfare system.
This project surfaced a critical insight: it is not enough to design tools that center youths’ needs. The social services infrastructure itself must be brought into the innovation process. A beautifully designed app will fail if it cannot integrate with a child welfare case management system, or if caseworkers are not trained to use it, or if privacy regulations block its deployment. The leadership circle allowed participants to map the full ecosystem of care—from frontline social workers to administrators to policymakers—and identify where digital tools could be most effectively inserted. The process revealed that technology innovation in this space is as much about systems change as it is about product design.
The AI Frontier: Supporting Care Providers in a New Era of Digital Risk
Kumar’s work has recently expanded into one of the most rapidly evolving domains of technology: artificial intelligence. This shift was driven by a startling realization: young people who had experienced trauma were already turning to AI to make critical life decisions—often without the knowledge or guidance of their caregivers. A teenager might ask a large language model for advice on whether to disclose a history of abuse to a new partner, or how to handle a conflict with a foster parent, or what to do when feeling suicidal. The AI, in turn, provides an answer that may or may not be accurate, appropriate, or safe.
This phenomenon presents a new and urgent challenge for care providers. Many are simply not aware that the youth they work with are using AI in these deeply personal ways. Kumar has focused on bridging this awareness gap. She has led training workshops with organizations that serve young people impacted by trauma or involved in the child welfare system. The training is not about teaching providers how to use AI tools themselves; it is about equipping them to have informed, non-judgmental conversations with young people about the AI they are already using.
The goal is to help caregivers move from a position of ignorance or panic to one of informed guidance. A social worker who knows how a large language model works, including its tendency to “hallucinate” or provide overly confident but incorrect answers, can talk to a young person about the limits of the tool. A therapist who asks “What did you ask the AI?” rather than “Are you using AI?” opens a door to a more honest and productive conversation. Kumar’s workshops provide the conceptual framework and the conversational scripts that make these interactions possible.
How Does Ila Kumar’s Approach Actually Work in Practice?
Kumar’s methodology can be broken down into a few clear, repeatable principles. First, the community is not a source of data to be extracted but a set of co-designers with decision-making power. This means that young people and care providers are involved in everything from problem definition to prototyping to evaluation. Second, the design process is trauma-informed, meaning that it actively works to avoid re-traumatization and to create conditions of safety and trust. Third, the resulting tools are designed to be embedded in existing systems of care, not to disrupt them. An app is valuable only if it fits into the workflow of a social worker or the daily life of a young person in a residential treatment program. Fourth, technology is not seen as a panacea. The digital tool is one component of a larger care system, not a replacement for human relationships.
When asked directly, “What is the core of Ila Kumar’s approach to technology design?”, the answer is clear: community-based co-design that prioritizes holistic well-being over feature lists, that treats young people as experts in their own lives, and that embeds digital tools within the social and relational systems that already support them.
A Nuanced View of Digital Platforms: Neither Savior nor Scourge
Public conversations about technology often present a stark choice: embrace it or reject it. Kumar believes that this binary is false and unhelpful. She sees clearly that digital platforms have the potential to both harm young people’s mental health and development, and also to help them process emotions, strengthen relationships, and practice healthy vulnerability. The determining factor is not the technology itself but how it is designed and how it is embedded. A social media platform can be a source of connection or a source of bullying, depending on its design features and the social context in which it is used. A therapy app can be a lifeline or a source of frustration, depending on whether it was designed with the input of the young people and clinicians who will use it.
Kumar’s work occupies this middle ground. She is not a techno-optimist who believes that code can solve complex social problems, nor is she a techno-pessimist who sees digital tools as inherently corrosive. She is a pragmatic, community-grounded designer who asks, “Under what conditions can this technology actually help?” and then sets about creating those conditions through collaborative design.
The Broader Implications for Technology, Mental Health, and Social Services
Kumar’s research has implications that extend well beyond the specific projects she has worked on. Her model of community-based co-design challenges the prevailing “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley, offering a slower, more inclusive, and more accountable alternative. It suggests that the most innovative technology solutions may come not from a garage in Palo Alto but from a collaboration between MIT researchers, a community-based organization in Los Angeles, and the young people themselves.
For the mental health field, Kumar’s work points to a future where digital tools are not just scaled versions of therapy but truly novel affordances—like visual collaging for emotional expression—that expand what is possible. For the child welfare system, her work offers a roadmap for integrating technology in a way that centers the agency of young people rather than simply tracking their compliance. For the technology industry, her work provides a concrete example of what trauma-informed, participatory design looks like in practice, a model that could be adapted for other sensitive domains like healthcare, education, and criminal justice.
Kumar’s approach also has strategic significance for funders and policymakers. Investing in technology for vulnerable populations is not just about funding product development; it is about funding the processes of collaboration, relationship-building, and systems integration that make those products effective. A grant that pays for app development but not for a 10-month technology leadership circle may produce a shiny prototype that never gets used. A grant that funds the circle, the partnerships, and the iterative co-design process may produce a simpler tool that actually changes lives.
The Road Ahead: AI, Ethics, and the Future of Participatory Design
As Kumar’s work moves further into the domain of AI, she is asking some of the most pressing questions facing the field. How do we design AI systems that are safe and appropriate for young people who have experienced trauma? How do we train the AI itself to be trauma-informed? How do we ensure that the deployment of AI in social services does not replicate existing biases or create new forms of surveillance? These questions have no easy answers, but Kumar’s method—bringing together young people, care providers, and technologists in a structured, sustained dialogue—offers a promising path forward.
The training workshops she has already conducted with organizations serving youth impacted by trauma are a first step. The next steps could include co-designing an AI literacy curriculum for youth in the child welfare system, or developing guidelines for the ethical use of conversational AI in therapy settings, or creating new tools that give young people more transparency and control over how AI is used in their care. Each of these projects would follow the same core principle: design technology with communities, not for them.
Ila Kumar’s career is still in its early stages, but her work has already established a clear, principled, and deeply practical alternative to the way technology is typically built for vulnerable populations. Her projects demonstrate that co-design is not a feel-good exercise; it is a rigorous methodology that produces better, more usable, and more impactful tools. Her training workshops show that the conversation about AI and youth mental health must begin with caregivers, not with algorithms. And her core insight—that the real impact of technology is determined not by its features but by the relationships and systems in which it is embedded—is a lesson that the entire field of “tech for good” would do well to learn.
