Ep. 289 - Measure of good designers with Ayaz Basrai

This is the first episode of a 10 Part series, "Designer’s Digest”. This series is about Design as a profession, it’s daily grind, the secrets to climbing the design career ladder and what edge we’ll need to thrive in the captivating world of design.

We start with Ayaz Basrai. Ayaz has been on Audiogyan’s 104th Episode where we spoke about “Designing interiors for your city.”

He is the founder of The Busride Studio based in Goa and Mumbai along with his brother Zameer. Ayaz Graduated in Industrial Design, specialising in Product Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in 2003. Ayaz studio ‘The Busride’ as an independent Design Studio specialising in the design and creation of environments, ranging from Hospitality, Entertainment venues, Film and Production to Exhibitions and temporary installations, and more.

Questions asked in the episode

1. Who according to you is a designer? You have been questioning this a lot.
2. What according to you is a role of a designer when they mature in their practice. Do the lines blur with art and then things become political or social in nature?
3. You have been engaging with very young talent like Prathmesh Jaju and others. Whats the reason for going so wide in our interest areas? How does it enrich your practice?
4. Eliel Saarinen’s famous line, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." What’s your take on it? Is it a pyramid kind of a thinking?
5. You have been tinkering a lot with rizhomatic thinking? Tell us a little bit about it. Does the other node need to have equally good to understand the larger context context to pass it on?
6. You talk about intergenerational kindness by giving the Oxford examples. What is it and how can that be practised by us who are future ancestors?
7. What is India Futures Project? Why do you engage in speculative fiction from a designer’s lens? Why create these future looking narratives? Are there instances of this done in the past of which we, inadvertently, we are part of? How real these narratives were back then, if any?
8. You have an article about placeless-ness. What provokes you to think of these future spaces while we are still having cows and camels on the road. Would you venture into these 15 minute cities or explore shapes and forms of cities in the meta-verse? On which principles of foundations these exploration happen?
9. We are looking at how AI in the cradle is smiling at us. What kind of skills do Centaur Designers will need to have?
10. How would designers of the future look like? Not just in the software and industrial realm but textile, graphics, interiors and so on…

Reference reading

• https://www.architectandinteriorsindia.com/lists/ayaz-zameer-basrai-co-founders-the-busride-design-studio
• https://www.instagram.com/thebusride/
• https://www.thepracticecept.com/thebusride
• https://thehardcopy.co/in-conversation-with-ayaz-basrai/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEiJMVjMyrE
• https://issuu.com/thebusride
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQWAJBpfzp8
• https://www.stirworld.com/inspire-people-arthur-mamou-mani-x-ayaz-basrai-cross-border-conversations
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMEaLTat3wE
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZJ4T50o95E