Deep seeking answers about AI in interior design

Beautiful Homes (BH): How has AI influenced your design philosophy and process over time?

Ayaz Basrai (AB): At The Busride, we've always been fascinated by new and fun workflows. Restaurant projects like Smokehouse Deli were seeded in the idea of hand-drawing a parody of opulence, and the thought behind Social was to harness the rebelliousness we saw all around us with the emergence of subcultures. Early on, we explored AI tools like Google's Co-lab, Stable Diffusion, and image or video-generating systems like MidJourney and Runway to enhance our Speculative Fiction projects. It’s both thrilling and unsettling to see how quickly the field is evolving. What’s most striking—and ironic—is how design and architecture remain obsessed with novelty, constantly asking, “What’s new?” when the real question should be, “What’s best?” In that sense, we are more Artificially Intelligent than the AI systems that we fear will replace us.

BH: The visualisations at the restaurant, The Second House in Goa blend technology and aesthetics. What role did AI play in shaping these elements?

AB: The visualisations at The Second House are built on layers of irony. It’s fascinating and absurd to create a media-driven art space in Goa, a place surrounded by natural beauty. It was strange to see people often overlook this beauty to sit in closed-off spaces, gazing at simulated images of nature they could freely experience outside. This paradox inspired the first set of visuals that populate the space. It was also meant to be an imitation of the “Old Goan Family Photo” stereotype often seen in themed restaurants. These AI-generated portraits feature surreal elements like people with televisions for heads or kids watching TV on a beach and lush landscapes overtaking dead Televisions. The visuals couldn’t have been created without AI, which we intentionally used as a constraint. To push the concept further, we framed these pieces like vintage wedding photos, collaborating with a wedding album photo-making studio in Madgaon for authenticity.

BH: You’ve used AI to create visualisations of potential futures in design. What have these explorations revealed about the future of architecture and interior design?

AB: At The Busride Lab, our Speculative futures studio in Goa, we aim to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. We’ve realised how we're outliving our relevance as design practitioners by focusing narrowly on stylised homes and interiors under the garb of luxury and ignoring the shared public realm. This creates a tone-deafness within the discipline. Architecture and design can play transformative roles in reallocating resources, fostering equitable exchanges, and enriching the public realm—but only if we move beyond superficial stereotypes. AI is one of many tools aiding our storytelling, allowing us to reimagine possibilities and critique our practice more meaningfully.