From the Lab to Experience Owners, MIT Research Reengineers Mental-Health and AI Tools Through Participatory Community Design

Researcher Ella Kumar, in the final year of her PhD with the Live Long Kindergarten group at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), starts from a methodological principle that departs from the conventional software development model: impactful innovation does not arise from engineers working in isolation from their environment, but emerges when end users participate in shaping the tool from the very first moment. This approach followed Kumar’s hands-on experience in Philadelphia and at the University of Pennsylvania on projects classified as “technology for the public good,” where she observed a lack of lasting impact for solutions built top-down and imposed on users without genuine consideration of their cultures and daily barriers.

True digital innovation is not achieved by developers sitting in a lab and throwing tools at people, but by involving lived-experience users in every design decision.This pathway is embodied in applied projects aimed at children and adolescents who have experienced psychological trauma or are within the social care system. Among the most prominent examples is the development of a communication system that relies on visual composition rather than dense text, created in partnership with Stepping Forward LA (a nonprofit organization), to help adolescents express complex emotions and build shared connections. Concurrently, the researcher is working with the Justice Resources Institute (a research institute) on a mobile application that enables adolescents to take an active role in mapping their mental-health treatment plans and tracking their goals outside the clinic, with direct involvement of therapists and youth during the building and evaluation phases.

As AI technologies become more widespread, Kumar’s research identified a sensitive phenomenon: adolescents who have suffered trauma are turning to AI models to make life-changing decisions in their daily lives, while parental and caregiver awareness of this behavior remains almost nonexistent. To address this gap, she has focused on conducting training workshops for NGOs and caregivers to equip them to initiate informed dialogues about AI with youth, and on leading a ten-month technical leadership cohort with the Foster America program (a social-service integration initiative) to bring together social services, lived-experience stakeholders and technology experts.

This shift has direct implications for health institutions and emerging digital platforms in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant, where investment in digitizing mental-health services, behavioral-support apps and counseling is accelerating. Relying on imported AI models or pre-programmed chatbot tools without participatory alignment with local social workers and family environments increases the risk of steering users toward unsafe choices during crises. These conditions compel product development teams and entrepreneurs in the region to involve local therapists and end users in training and design phases, and to equip guidance staff in schools and care centers to manage the growing reliance of the younger generation on AI tools as unsupervised personal advisors.

The effort to entrench this model extends to teaching a community-innovation course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Presila King Gray Center, and to establishing a practice forum that connects MIT researchers with Harvard University. The future of technologies with tangible impact lies in shifting researchers and developers from making decisions on behalf of communities to making them alongside those communities.