Ila Kumar: Innovating with communities
Before Ila Kumar thinks about how to build technology, she asks a different question: What is the context that technology will operate in, and who needs to be involved in the design?
For Kumar, meaningful innovation doesn’t result from engineers or designers working in isolation. Instead, she believes the best innovations emerge when the people who stand to benefit from a technology help create it from the very beginning.
That philosophy has guided her research in the Lifelong Kindergarten group, where she works alongside young people who have experienced trauma during childhood, particularly those involved in the child welfare system, to reimagine how technology can support healing, connection, and independence.
“I really think that community-based design is the only way that we can make technology that accounts for communities’ needs, but also their barriers, their cultures, their concerns,” Kumar says. “It’s the only way that we can make really...
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