Ancestry Is a Design System
Ancestry is often seen as the past, but in design it’s a living system. Every form carries memory. To create what lasts, we don’t invent from nothing. We translate what came before into what comes next.
We tend to think of ancestry as something behind us, a lineage of names, faces, and stories reaching backward into the fog of time. But I’ve come to understand it differently. Ancestry is a system—a living operating model. It’s how ideas, aesthetics, and ways of being travel through the world. Every design practice is built on one, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Design has always been about memory, about how we encode experience into form. The curve of a chair leg, the geometry of a façade, the rhythm of a typeface: each carries an echo of the conditions that shaped it. Somewhere, someone felt the sun hit a wall just so and built an angle to hold it. Someone listened to wind moving through reeds and heard a pattern worth repeating. These gestures become data, passed hand to hand across generations until they become the foundations of craft.
In that sense, ancestry isn’t biological; it’s methodological. It’s a system of design decisions refined through time, not by trend but by survival. Every culture and maker has evolved its own protocols: how to balance beauty and utility, embed values in material, and create coherence between the seen and the felt. When I design, whether a digital tool, a physical product, or a piece of visual identity, I’m not inventing from scratch. I’m in conversation with that lineage of intelligence.
Our modern obsession with originality has made us forget this. We treat newness as divinity and inheritance as constraint. But the most radical designers are translators, not originators. They know that creativity emerges through dialogue between eras, mediums, ancestors, and descendants. To design is to listen deeply to what has already been designed and ask, What does it want to become next?
I learned this early, not in design school but through the quiet rituals of everyday life, watching how my elders arranged a room, how they cooked without recipes, and how they told stories that folded the supernatural into the practical. These weren’t just traditions; they were interface designs for living. Each action encoded values: resourcefulness, balance, beauty as responsibility. Over time, I understood that these gestures, the way a meal is plated, the way a door creaks open to welcome, were forms of system design before we had a name for it.
Ancestry also teaches rhythm. Western design thinking often privileges the grid, the straight line, the linear timeline. But ancestral design systems move in circles. Cycles of repetition, call and response, improvisation. You don’t design on top of history; you design with it, the way a jazz musician riffs within a standard. That rhythm of return, of variation within continuity, is how cultures stay alive. It’s how design evolves without erasure.
In practice, this means slowing down and observing before imposing. When I build something new, I start by asking: What already exists here? What forms, stories, or rituals are waiting to be translated rather than replaced? Sometimes the answer is silence, space for others to bring their own design systems forward. Sometimes it’s a pattern we can amplify. It’s a reminder that my role as a designer is not to create the future but to steward one worth remembering.
We live in a time when machines can generate infinite variations faster than thought. But even AI depends on its ancestors, on the datasets, human choices, and biases that trained it. The question is not whether we’ll design with ancestry, but whose ancestry we will feed the system. If we ignore that lineage, we risk designing without memory, and memory is the only thing that gives meaning to form.
To design with ancestry, then, is to design with humility: to recognize that every artifact, from a clay pot to a user interface, is a collaboration across generations. To ask not just what does this do? but what does this continue?
And maybe that’s what distinguishes design that lasts from design that merely trends: the former carries memory like a current, steady and unseen, connecting us backward and forward through time.
Because the future, too, will one day be someone’s ancestor.
“Innovation without ancestry is amnesia dressed as ambition.” — Azeez Alli-Balogun
