Buy local: Design a home with farm-to-table ideas

The other day, scrolling through Instagram, I was accosted by a sponsored post pitching an AI design tool. Responding to descriptive prompts like "contemporary" and "rustic," it could turn out a vast number of stylistic options for one space—basically, you skip the part about process and research and just embrace spatial personality dysregulation.

- MANJU SARA RAJAN

This is a world where the word "contemporary" conjures rounded beige boucle sofas and neutral walls, where "rustic" signifies live-edge tables and dark wood accents. There is a complete lack of context. They could be from everywhere, anywhere and somewhere all at once, spaces that seem so stereotyped yet fanatically banal that you cannot even guess a cultural or geographical connection. Eerily, though, the images that showed up looked similar to many of the real-life projects that we see at the moment.

At the same time, some of the most popular subjects on design platforms are topics like "How to design a puja room." A recent favorite among the readers of the design content website that I run was a story on the subject of Indian-isms in design. We are going through a period where there are all sorts of options available. You can go the route of the ubiquitous, or you cast a vote for a bit of sociocultural representation in your space.

DESIGN FOR SERENDIPITY

As someone who spends a lot of time looking at images and reading about projects, I know that it costs more when your design rebuffs its cultural and geographical context. Even if you happen to use AI technology to get a design, inevitably the price of buying things that look like they're from other places takes a lot of resources and the results are far from satisfying.

Far more interesting and pocket-friendly is to buy local. Design your space with the same approach as the farm-to-table principle for food. Do a little less, buy things off the cuff, see what happens when you make a few mistakes. Spaces are more interesting when they're created with a certain effortlessness but there is no way to articulate effortlessness if things have found their way into a room with excessive consideration.