After gaining experience as a qualitative researcher in public health, Eileen Feng mused about how she might take that knowledge and apply it to product design. She sought out a program soon after completing a master’s program in public health, finding her fit with the Integrated Product Design master’s program, a joint program between the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Wharton School, and the Weitzman School of Design.
The goal: not just to design a product, but to bridge design, business vision, and technology.
“It was very important for me to have this interdisciplinary opportunity to learn not just design in action, but to work with a group of creative leaders from the local community, and together explore the use case of AI in their creative journey,” says Feng. “Design, in this case, serves as both a tool and a facilitator in aligning the vision of a multidisciplinary team.”
Since March 2024, Feng has worked with an interdisciplinary team awarded a Penn4C community-led partnership grant, including faculty from the School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2), the School of Nursing, and Penn Engineering. Together, they’ve worked in collaboration with Creative Resilient Youth (CRY), a youth-led mental health advocacy and creative arts initiative established in 2018 for teens in Philadelphia. The collective addresses injustices in youth mental health care, especially among marginalized communities. The youth have contributed to co-design sessions to build an AI-supported platform for the Penn4C project, titled “Digital Healing,” that facilitates art making toward the aim of reflection and meaningful community building—tackling an epidemic of loneliness intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform also provides an alternative to social media.
“In a tech world where not everything is bringing true and good impact to the people who are using it, I think these kinds of initiatives to build community-driven products are incredibly valuable and reflect our willingness to experiment through intense collaboration, even when the process is highly ambiguous,” says Feng.
Siva Mathiyazhagan, a research assistant professor in SP2 and PI of the project, describes the tool as having two key functions: It provides youth a space to discuss their feelings, with the help of prompts; and, importantly, the tool can make personalized recommendations for art projects that relate to those feelings. Digital Healing, Mathiyazhagan says, is not about generating artwork—as other AI tools have already done—but filling what he calls “a process gap.”
“When it comes to creative arts, [AI] is generating a lot of artworks that come from someone else, but it’s not really facilitating the creative arts ‘process,’ so the process gap is there and it’s about creating a process where the AI can assist for the healing,” he says. “When the AI and then the human brain are processing this together, what kind of healing happens?”
The pilot for the project, which will begin this summer, will help provide scientific evidence on that front, ensuring participant engagement and integrating engagement metrics into the intervention evaluation. The team has also designed the tool to be collaborative; youth might exchange ideas together, share feelings, or they have the option to share their work in a digital exhibition space that’s built in as a product feature.
“This is more about using AI as a powerful source to reduce the mental blocker that often comes in the creative process and building a community that prioritizes the process over outcome of creativity, fostering mental resilience and peer connection over time,” says Feng. “We ensured that this aligns with the original goals and vision of Creative Resilient Youth, which is to nurture creativity and empower young voices.
“That is the part where we think AI can be integrated into this product that differentiates it from what’s available out there.”
Avani Alvarez, who in collaboration with co-director of CRY and co-PI Andrea Ngan helped to facilitate the product co-design phase with the CRY youth, says that the experience has been “fulfilling,” witnessing how the project has allowed the youth to have autonomy, power, and voice. While the youth were skeptical of how the tool would be useful, she says they eventually came around, finding several ways it would be helpful in supporting a healing digital environment and facilitating real-life artmaking and connectivity.
“Youth using this platform are going to write entries about how they’re feeling, to do little check-ins before they start creating art,” she explains. “So, the AI is able to take that initial check-in and provide prompts based on how you’re feeling that day. If you’re feeling really low, it can provide a prompt that will either help quell that or help you to digest it a little more while making art—and so on, and so forth. And they really like that idea.”
The CRY youth co-designed and offered insights in collaboration with engineers led by research assistant professor and co-PI Sharath Chandra Guntuku of Penn Engineering. That team established feasibility for suggested features.
“Digital health interventions have become more popular in recent years, and their importance became even clearer during the pandemic as an affordable and accessible way to promote well-being and healthy behaviors,” says Seul Ki Choi, a research assistant professor in Penn Nursing and co-PI on the project. “For younger generations, digital health interventions have been especially helpful in improving mental health. Our project uses digital spaces—proven to be effective in supporting health and building community—as a safe and healing platform for improving mental health among BIPOC young individuals in the Philadelphia region.”
Choi is particularly optimistic about the scalability of the project in other populations that struggle with loneliness. The group also collectively has gained increased appreciation for the value of community partnership in developing interventions like Digital Healing.
“Through this project, I have gained a deeper understanding of the importance of collaborating with community partners from the study’s beginning to its end,” Choi says. “Research often struggles to translate its impact into real-world applications, but this project is led by the community with a strong sense of stewardship, enabling the design of interventions that are more relevant, culturally sensitive, and aligned with their needs. This community-led approach has the potential to create meaningful changes in their daily lives while ensuring that the findings remain both practical and actionable.”
Artificial intelligence touches disciplines across campus. In a limited spring profile series, Penn Today is highlighting innovative students at Penn who are adopting this technology in a variety of projects. To learn more about how members of the Penn community are pioneering the understanding and advancement of AI, visit the Penn AI website.
