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.