Nexus
Design inspired by culture, not trends.
An interactive platform that helps designers rediscover originality through culture — connecting creativity, community, and design beyond the algorithm.
What's the Problem?
We’re creating faster than ever, but everything is starting to look the same.
25% Boost in Productivity
A 2024 study found that while productivity increased, originality dropped across AI-generated designs.
Decline in Originality
Designs began to merge the same compositions, same color palettes, same ideas repeated in slightly different forms. (PubMed, 2024)
Aesthetic Homogenization
Researchers describe this as a “digital monoculture,” where bias and data repetition shape creativity. (arXiv, 2024)
If this continues, are we headed toward a future where design no longer reflects people, culture or stories — only algorithms and trends.
Framing the problem
How might we distinguish people’s individuality in a creative perspective and help them design from culture, not conformity?
We started by exploring themes around inspiration, community, culture, and creativity. Our goal was to help designers embrace their individuality and understand the meaning behind their design choices instead of replicating what already exists.
When we looked at the prompt “Designing Beyond Our Lifetime,” we couldn’t ignore AI. While it makes design faster and more accessible, it also risks taking away originality. We didn’t want to reject it, but rather redefine its role — AI should support exploration, not take over creativity.
Our focus is on emerging designers and creatives who want to explore inspirations, think independently, and find originality beyond AI-generated trends.
What does seeking design inspiration currently look like, and what can we change about that process?
Our goal was to understand how designers currently explore and interact with resources to inspire their creative work; this helped us move beyond just the design process, but the ripple effects of how their process might influence their work and others' work in a 100 years. This helped us determine ways we could change what those ripple effects were.
Ideation
What can help keep the spark alive — the X-Factor that makes design human?
We sought to understand what makes our creative expressions unique as humans. From personal anecdotes to our quirks and even personality traits, various aspects shape our unique voice. We realized that fostering a collective creative legacy through personal inspiration, cultural references and even sharing knowledge about various ideologies would ensure that designers remain connected, aware and conscious of the human values which shape our work and environment.
Helping designers trace the lineage of design, learn and imbibe Ideologies rather than just replicate aesthetics
We sketched 4 unique user flows for the product, allowing designers to tap into the creative legacy of various communities through exploring artwork and designs freely or searching for specific interests. Users could showcase their design stories and AI will help them find inspiration to draw from design ideologies and cultural values that they may not previously have considered. At the end, we merged our highlighted pages and combined them into one coherent experience.
Refining our Vision
We transformed our initial sketches into medium-fidelity wireframes to support the unique user flows which encapsulate exploring works, learning more about the cultural values that shaped them and allowing users to see how their own creative voice is being shaped by ideologies.
If AI shapes the present, culture preserves the future.
Nexus helps designers explore their roots, share their stories, and design beyond their lifetime.
Rediscover inspiration beyond the algorithm
Dive into a living archive of cultures, design ideologies, and creative movements — seeing how traditions and values continue to shape today’s design world.
See how your creative identity connects to broader cultural narratives.
Trace the lineage behind your design choices — uncovering the ideologies, elements, and influences that shape your personal design voice.
Add your story to the collective creative tapestry.
Showcase your design journey, experiences, and inspirations so others can learn from the cultural and personal perspectives behind your work.
Bonus Feature
Capture, connect, and create.
Save inspirations, sketches, and artifacts in one evolving space: a digital scrapbook that helps you ideate, visualize connections, and build projects rooted in meaning.
Impact
By providing designers with these tools that encourage cultural exploration and self-reflection, Nexus helps reduce the reliance on AI-generated trends and re-centers human intent and identities in the creative process. This allows designers to think critically, create consciously, and make their own creative decisions. This allows for people to express their individuality through their creative work more effectively. By helping people become more informed creatives, we can ensure culture and shared communal knowledge is being preserved and not lost within trends, allowing for more representation in design overall.
Over the next decades, as AI-powered systems continue to learn from creatives' content, this shift becomes all the more crucial. Nexus can help reshape how we leverage AI through preserving cultural context behind creatives' works — this helps preserve perspective, values and human authenticity which future technology can learn from.
In 50 or 100 years, the datasets that train creative systems could carry forward these diverse voices, helping technology remember not just what we made, but why we made it.
