I zoomed out on my Pinterest boards and got scared

I opened Pinterest to find one image!!

An hour later I had 40 pins, a headache, and zero images I actually needed.

I only noticed something was off when I zoomed out.

Every board looked the same.

Same beige. Same arch doorway. Same shelf with three books and one vase.

Different names. Same room.

I started asking my students to show me their “inspiration” boards before we planned anything.

Almost every board had the same five images, just cropped differently.

Nobody had picked these rooms.

The algorithm had….

Pinterest doesn’t show you what you like.

It shows you what already performed well for someone else, then waits to see if you’ll like it too.

You did.

So it showed you more of it.

Enough people liked it before you that it stopped being a preference and became a default.

That’s not taste.

That’s a feedback loop wearing a mood board as a disguise.

As a designer, this scares me more than a bad floor plan.

A bad floor plan is fixable.

A flattened sense of taste isn’t something you notice is missing, because it still feels like yours.

So now, before I let a student pin a single image, I ask one question.

“If you’d never seen this on a screen, would you still want it in your home?”

Most people go quiet.

Not because the answer is no.

Because they’ve never had to ask.

Good design doesn’t start with a board.

It starts with the one room you’d actually miss if it burned down, and none of it will be beige. - Esha Bhandari