ILA KRISHNA KUMAR
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SELECTED PROJECTS
2026 - present
AI WORKSHOPS FOR CAREGIVERS OF TRAUMA-IMPACTED YOUTH
Creating materials and training programs that equip the adults in youths’ lives (including teachers, social workers, counselors, parents, foster caregivers, advocates, and mentors) with the information and socioemotional skills they need to engage in non-judgmental, impactful conversations about technology use and help youth develop healthy technology self-regulation skills.
2025 - 2026
INNOVATION PROGRAMS FOR YOUTH IN FOSTER CARE
Designed and co-facilitated internship and career development programs for youth in foster care to engage in technology exploration and creative prototyping activities. Participants developed their ability to critically reflect on new and ubiquitous technologies and their sense of confidence with and control over the technologies in their lives.
Read about the learnings from the pilot of a six-week internship program for youth in foster care: [Draft paper citation]
2024
TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP CIRCLE FOR LIVED EXPERTS IN FOSTER CARE
Collaborated with Foster America to run codesign workshops across the country to identify ways that technology-mediated interventions could address the urgent needs of youth impacted by foster care. Then, designed and co-facilitated a 10-month innovation program in which lived experts and technology experts paired up to fully flesh out what these sociotechnical systems need to look like to be successful.
Established an annual national child welfare innovation symposium at MIT Media Lab in 2024, through which the findings of this project were presented by lived experts and furthered by an interdisciplinary group of technologists, lived experts, child welfare service providers, and other changemakers.
Video about the 2024 Fostering Futures Forum, in which the results of the codesign workshops were presented.
2023 - present
TECH FOR CREATIVE PROCESSING AND EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS AFTER TRAUMA
Co-designed an arts-based digital interface to support trauma-impacted youth with expressing complex, difficult to verbalize emotions in ways that others can understand and resonate with. The interface is currently being integrated into platforms where trauma-impacted youth already go to seek resources in the transition out of foster care and while receiving therapy services.
Read about early iterations in the design process:[Paper citation]
Read about the results of final prototype-testing:[TRF citation, link to slides]
2021 - 2023
DIGITAL TECH TO FOSTER SOCIAL SUPPORT AMONGST FOSTER-IMPACTED YOUTH
Co-design and evaluation of a novel digital platform to support youth impacted by foster care with practicing healthy vulnerability and sharing support with one another.
Read about the project: [Paper citation]
PUBLICATIONS
Ila K Kumar, Sara Inácio, and Carrie Hyde-Riley. 2026. “Who are you, the feelings machine?!”: Using digital technology to support self-directed creative emotional expression among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’26), July 13–16, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages.
Christine Wu*, Ila K Kumar*, and Rosalind Picard. 2025. Navigating Emotions Through Art: Recommendations for Designing Art-Therapy Based Chatbots for Trauma-Impacted Youth. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI (CHI EA ’25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages.
Ila K Kumar*, Jocelyn Shen*, Craig Ferguson, and Rosalind W Picard. 2024. Connecting through Comics: Design and Evaluation of an Arts-Based Digital Platform for Trauma-Impacted Youth. In CSCW ’25: Proceedings of the 28th ACM CSCW Conference, November 09–13, 2024, Bergen, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 23 pages.
Ila K Kumar, Craig Ferguson, Jiayi Wu, and Rosalind W Picard. 2024. Sphere: Designing Technology to Increase Social Support for Foster-Involved Youth. In CSCW ’25: Proceedings of the 28th ACM CSCW Conference, November 09–13, 2024, Bergen, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 24 pages.
Ila K Kumar. 2023. Fostering Well-Being: Designing Technology to Improve the Psychological Well-being of Foster-Involved Youth. MIT. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/152759
Katarina Richter-Lunn* and Ila K Kumar*. 2022. Acu.ation: Real Time Acupoint Stimulation To Mediate The Urge To Smoke. In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’22), 1–7.
Lyena Birkenstock, Thomas Chen, Sree Chintala, Andrea Ngan, Jenna Spitz, Ila K Kumar, Theo Loftis, Melissa Fogg, Nadia Malik, and Amy Riley. 2021. Pivoting a Community-Based Participatory Research Project for Mental Health and Immigrant Youth in Philadelphia During COVID-19. In Health Promotion Practice 23: 152483992110333.
Megan Bogia, Chloé Nurik, Andrea Ngan, Bennett Kuhn, Ila K Kumar, and Jessa Lingel. 2018. Institutional Shadow Bodies in Mental Health Care Information Seeking. In Companion of the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ’18 Companion), 269–272
* equal contribution to the manuscript