Looking To The Future, Backed By Solid Traditional Knowledge

Ayaz Basrai is a graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Busride Design was launched by Ayaz Basrai along with his architect brother Zameer, a CEPT graduate. Busride has dabbled in designing Bollywood sets, miniature sets, exhibitions and kiosks, retail galleries, restaurants and boutique hotels, amongst built environments. They’ve also worked in the area of street art and graffiti, illustration, heritage conservation and urban planning; which Ayaz says, informs their practice in profound ways.

- Sharmila Chakravorty

Speaking at the 361 degrees conference, Ayaz Basrai of Bandra-based The Busride Design Studio outlined the many inquiries and experiments the studio was engaged in. Describing the studio as a polyvalent entity that deals with a mixed bag of projects from sandcastles for Disney to more permanent ones like restaurants and bars, and retail stores, their success perhaps stems out of the giving up of coherence, and resigning to chaos. The studio is also informed by age-old ‘gyaan’ floating around all over Bandra; a church they pass by often has a sign that reads – No one ever moved forward while being chained to the past.

Designing for the future and the notion of time

With this as the starting point, the studio pursues a number of inquiries and experiments – mainly around the notion of time. In the most conventional sense, our idea of time is going on an upward projection from the past to the future, in a linear way. This is reinforced by western notions of science, our day to day experiences of reading clocks, etc. However, the Eastern notion of time is cyclical, as a constantly repeating loop, always in reoccurrence. This, he says, is really just the idea that everything that is happening right now, has happened in the past and is going to happen sometime in the future. This notion helps lay more responsibility for the maintenance of things we use, and the importance of creating closed loop economies.