Combining AI and artmaking for youth well-being

Our Youth Partners at Creative Resilient Youth were featured by Penn Today for collaborating with a Penn4C team to build an AI-supported platform designed to help young people discuss their mental health and build community through art.

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. […]

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?”

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