Digital Drift
AI Design Tools, UI/UX Design, Thesis
Digital Drift is a graduate thesis proposing an AI-powered research assistant that sits between a whiteboard and a generator. Helping designers navigate complexity and uncover the narrative within it.
As a research assistant, Digital Drift is designed to support designers in the early stages of the design process. It uses AI to transform messy drafts into clear narratives that can be presented to clients or team members.
Now, let’s walk through how to use the product with our user, Billy.
How to Use Digital Drift?
Billy is a freelance graphic designer based in California. He has been commissioned by LA Metro to create a timeline poster for their 100th anniversary.
He want to gather his initial ideas and prepare a clear creative direction to present at next week's client meeting using Digital Drift.
User Persona: Billy
Input Materials
Billy starts by adding the client's design brief as the initial node.
Then he begins collecting and organizing assets using the “Add New Node” feature, simply dragging and dropping images, videos, websites, or website clips into the interface.
Gathering Research
Now that Billy has gotten his messy thoughts onto this canvas, he moves forward to do more research using the “Related Research” and “Find Similar Images” features.
Exploring Relationships
To make sense of everything he has gathered, Billy connects nodes using the “Node Connections” feature. By simply dragging the handles, he creates a mind map that visualizes the relationships between all assets.
Identifying Direction
Now that Billy has all the assets and ideas ready, he wants to identify potential creative concepts.
But before he jumps to creating a narrative, he wants to make sure what he's building toward is actually what the client asked for.
So he sets the node that contains the design brief as a North Star. With it, the narrative will connect his research back to the actual brief."
Create Narrative
Billy selects the nodes that best represent his creative direction and uses the “Create Narrative” feature to generate a concept.
AI analyzes the selected nodes and suggests several narrative directions. Once a direction is chosen, he defines a framing angle that shapes the perspective of the story.
The result is a structured narrative that consolidates his research and creative exploration.
Final Outcome
Billy uses the narrative generated in Digital Drift to build a clear, structured presentation script, enabling him to successfully communicate his ideas to the client during the meeting.
My thesis begins with the idea of commuting. Just as people travel between home and work, designers move between tools like Pinterest, Figma, InDesign, and ChatGPT.
These so-called “in-between” moments reveal a deeper truth: the design process is nonlinear by default."
The Thesis Digest newspaper acts as a trailer to the project, revealing the initial inspiration and thought process, while inviting viewers to join the journey.
Initial Inspiration
This half-letter size book documents my early-stage thesis exploration through conversations with ChatGPT. The layout replicates a chat interface: the right pages present the actual dialogue, while the left pages capture my inner monologue in response.
As an information design piece, Point A reveals how contemporary designers work with AI as part of their everyday design process.
Conversation with AI
Early Prototype Explorations
The early exploratory prototypes are developed before the final system took shape.
These initial experiments tested conceptual ideas, interaction possibilities, and structural approaches that helped define the overall direction of Digital Drift.
Rather than focusing on refinement, this phase was about discovery and establishing the project’s core trajectory.
Prototype 1
Tool: FigJam AI mind map
The first prototype used FigJam AI to continuously generate ideas from the prompt: “A node-based interface for design thinking.” I kept prompting it until the output no longer made sense.
This experiment tests the limits of AI when designer input is gradually removed from the thinking process, while also questioning what kinds of tools are truly useful for designers.
Prototype 2
Tool: FLORA AI
The second prototype used the same prompt: “A node-based interface for design thinking,” but this time with FLORA AI, which was able to generate visual outputs.
Without designer input and critique, the results quickly became repetitive and ineffective.
This raised questions about the necessary level of human interaction when collaborating with AI, highlighting how AI often acts as an executor while shifting the designer’s role toward judgment and decision-making.
