New Delhi, June 14 -- 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.

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 geographic...