Lumina

Inspiration

Our project Lumina, which means “brilliant light”, serves as a beacon of light for aspiring creatives who aim to share their story in an unapologetically authentic way. Upon hearing the prompt, which tasks us with designing a product that fosters the cultivation of creative expression to create a more inclusive and equitable society, we immediately thought of storytelling. We firmly believe every individual has a story to tell and deserves the right to do so in a safe and nurturing environment that encourages creativity and intellectual curiosity. This fueled our ideas of creating a massive collection of stories where users could seamlessly create, publish, and explore various experiences across the globe. As you will witness in our demo, the abundance of stories submitted by users worldwide lights up the globe with a spectrum of colors.

Main design decisions

Our main design decisions centered around creating a safe, versatile medium that encourages creativity and intellectual curiosity. One way we accomplished this was by highlighting the importance of anonymity in the sharing process. Our platform does not allow users to follow other artists or view any information that might be tied to their identification, unless explicitly mentioned in their content. We intentionally deviated from building a platform akin to existing social media networks due to the widespread hate and toxicity that it may harbor as well as for safety/privacy reasons. Whether a user identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and cannot freely express their stories due to certain laws or customs in their region, or is simply not ready to openly vocalize parts of their identity through their experiences, Lumina serves as an outlet for the experiences they would like to share. Another major design decision was to ease the search process for a story by integrating a search bar and filter, allowing users to quickly locate stories of interest. This decision was intended to expand access to stories and inspire further creative expression. Consequently, our decisions to support various media formats in our book making process makes our platform adaptable to artists with differing concentrations such as sketching, photography, etc. To stay true to our values of inclusivity and equity, we enforced several accessibility requirements such as having alternative text for images, captions on video and audio content, a readability check, keyword tags so other users may easily query for a story, and translations. Overall, the application is a digital library for those who want to create or share their creations.

Built With

• figma