A lamp takes physical shape through its precise proportions, the choice of materials, and its dynamic relationship with light. A voice interface, by contrast, has to make complete sense to a user without ever giving them a screen to navigate or visually map out. Meanwhile, designing a drone brings together physical hardware, intricate software, and unpredictable operating conditions into a singular, complex design problem. These seemingly distant territories of the creative world are brought together in Episode 25 of Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s official podcast powered by KeyShot. Hosted by Radhika Seth, the podcast premieres weekly to explore the underlying thinking behind creative work and the crucial decisions that shape a professional designer’s practice. This particular episode tackles a deeply compelling question for modern creators: what actually carries over when a designer moves into an entirely unfamiliar field?
Anshuman Kumar, the guest for this milestone episode, brings extensive firsthand experience with precisely such transitions. His professional career spans a wide array of domains, starting with sports equipment design at Decathlon, moving into lifestyle products, spending six years at Samsung working across areas like voice intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and generative AI, and subsequently pivoting into UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) design at ideaForge. Alongside his corporate career, Kumar actively teaches and develops deeply personal explorations, such as the nature-inspired Bloom Lamp. This diverse background makes for an engaging and wide-ranging interview, yet the conversation moves far beyond a simple chronological tour of different industries. Instead, Kumar explains how early professional experiences inform later design decisions, why certain creative ideas still require the deliberate slowness of sketching on paper, and what fundamentally changes when a design can no longer be revised through a simple software update. Together, these observations offer a grounded, realistic account of working across multiple design disciplines.
A Career Built Through Iteration, Not Reinvention
“Every move I made was an iteration, not a reset. The domain changed, the question I was asking never did.” Kumar’s concise description of his career provides a useful framework for understanding its remarkable variety. Moving fluidly between physical consumer products, intelligent digital services, and heavy industrial drones certainly required acquiring new technical knowledge, but it did not render his existing professional experience obsolete. The core responsibilities of understanding a person’s daily needs, framing an ambiguous problem, and working patiently through uncertain possibilities remained universally applicable across every single transition.
The unfamiliar aspects of each new role demanded active learning rather than a wholesale replacement of his professional identity. Viewed through this lens, a varied career becomes cumulative rather than fragmented. Each role adds another distinct set of questions, manufacturing constraints, and creative methods that ultimately influence the next assignment, even when the final output looks entirely different from anything the designer has built before.
This perspective directly shapes his advice to aspiring designers and students. Kumar recalls his early childhood encounters with electronics and basic science as periods of playful, uninhibited exploration, while his later formal education at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) provided a much more systematic, rigorous foundation. He expresses concern over the modern pressure placed on young creators to adopt a narrowly defined professional label before those foundational creative skills have had adequate time to develop. While UX design, textile design, and motion design describe meaningful professional differences, they can also prematurely become restrictive boundaries. His core suggestion is to establish deep personal roots before concentrating on the specialized branches. For any professional considering a major change in direction, the practical implication is clear: examine which core abilities naturally transfer to the new field before assuming that a new job title means starting completely from scratch.
The Bloom Lamp Translates Natural Observations Into Form
Kumar’s Bloom Lamp serves as a tangible example of how he successfully connects disparate ideas into a single physical object. The project’s initial conceptual starting points were remarkably organic: the protective canopy of a mushroom and the distinct spiraling movement of a small flower falling gently from a branch. One natural observation suggested a compelling silhouette, while the other introduced organic movement and a complex relationship with the surrounding air. Bringing those two elements together required much more than simply selecting an appealing, organic-looking outline.
Kumar describes developing the lamp through multiple rigorous iterations and hands-on experiments with 3D printing, giving the concept a physical testing ground far beyond digital visualization. “It was not just sitting as a good render,” he notes during the interview. The Bloom project emerges as a deeply personal design exploration, where the true value lies in the difficult translation from an observed natural behavior into a functional form that can actually be manufactured.
The conversation also examines how consciously these natural references enter his broader commercial work. Kumar describes maintaining a careful balance between unguided intuition and a deliberate, methodical framework, depending entirely on the demands of the specific assignment. A commercial client brief may require a closely defined direction and strict adherence to corporate guidelines, whereas a personal project can freely begin with a simple natural observation whose ultimate relevance only becomes clear through prolonged exploration.
However, intuition still requires rigorous examination and critique. An appealing form must always be revisited to determine whether it successfully communicates the intended idea and whether its physical proportions hold together under scrutiny. This qualification gives the discussion real substance. Nature supplies a compelling starting point and a rich vocabulary, but the designer must still make hard decisions, test complex relationships, and recognize when an attractive reference has not yet matured into a convincing, workable object.
Knowing When to Move From Paper to Pixels
For Kumar, any creative idea that has not yet acquired a clear, actionable direction firmly belongs on paper first. Traditional drawing gives him the necessary mental room to discover what he is actually trying to make before demanding explicit, pixel-perfect decisions from digital software. “That slow process is very important for me to set a defined direction,” he explains. The primary value lies in the direct physical coordination between the human hand, the eye, and underlying thought, with each successive drawing helping him gain confidence in the emerging concept.
While slowness has a vital purpose here, it is not an invitation to sketch indefinitely without a goal. He cautions against the trap of making hundreds of drawings without increasing one’s certainty. The truly useful skill is recognizing the precise moment when paper has answered its initial questions and another medium must take over the process.
Digital rendering enters this workflow as another investigative tool to interrogate a design, rather than merely a means to produce a polished final presentation. Discussing the role of tools like KeyShot, Kumar describes a fluid working relationship between sketching, computer-aided design (CAD), visualization, and physical prototyping that moves back and forth as complex questions arise. A CAD model can establish baseline geometry while leaving the fine appearance of materials, surface textures, and surrounding environments entirely unresolved.
Rendering helps him closely examine those relationships and return to the underlying model with a much clearer intention. Physical iterations remain an indispensable part of this exchange, answering practical questions that a digital image simply cannot settle on its own. The entire process is less about completing a rigid, fixed sequence of stages and more about selecting whatever medium makes the next uncertainty easier to examine and discuss with collaborators.
Learning to Design Beyond the Screen
Kumar is refreshingly candid about feeling genuine anxiety when he joined Samsung and entered its voice intelligence group. The prestigious opportunity followed a national design competition, but the assignment plunged him into a specialized field he had not specifically trained to enter. Moving away from traditional visual interfaces removed a familiar organizing surface: there was no physical screen on which to lay out every visual choice or clearly guide a user through the next sequential step. User inputs could be highly ambiguous, and interactions had to function entirely through a less explicit, auditory exchange.
He credits supportive mentors with helping him navigate this unfamiliar layer, emphasizing that systems thinking was crucial to making the transition successfully. Eventually, a self-directed mobility project brought voice and vision intelligence together around advanced driver assistance systems, progressing successfully through Samsung’s internal C-Lab program, though the specific details of the final solution remain confidential.
His subsequent career move to ideaForge brought those technological interests back into a distinctly physical, industrial setting. Kumar already enjoyed flying drones recreationally, and working with UAV systems offered a unique opportunity to combine that personal enthusiasm with his professional experience developing services around emerging technologies. Safety and security applications also contributed heavily to the overall appeal.
Leaving a tech giant like Samsung prompted widespread disbelief from people around him, and he readily acknowledges the vast resources and reach available within a large technology corporation. Still, the new role offered a compelling combination of interests worth pursuing. The interview does not unpack a specific drone model or provide a heavily technical case study of its engineering development; instead, it reveals the internal reasoning behind the move. Kumar recognized an emerging field where several of his existing capabilities could become useful simultaneously, while still leaving him plenty of challenging new territory to learn.
Hardware Makes Commitment Harder to Reverse
One of the most practical exchanges in the episode begins with a hypothetical scenario involving an experienced fintech UX designer who suddenly wants to create physical objects for the home. When asked what that designer would specifically need to unlearn, Kumar focuses heavily on the software industry’s comfortable expectation that a released product or experience can be instantly corrected through a later digital update.
Changing physical hardware, by contrast, frequently requires an entirely new development cycle, a completely revised physical version, and a substantial financial investment. Furthermore, the physical form of a product establishes immutable possibilities and strict constraints for all the digital services that follow it.
This reality dramatically changes both the timing and the overall weight of design decisions. Experience in UX remains valuable—particularly in understanding human behavior, empathy, and user interactions—but the physical medium demands profound patience and an entirely different relationship with commitment. Certain creative choices become financially and practically expensive to revisit much earlier than a software-focused designer might naturally expect.
This acute awareness of constraints also shapes Kumar’s perspective on creating moments of genuine delight for users. “At the same time, designers are not sitting in an ivory tower, right?” he points out. An intended user experience must always survive harsh contact with physical technical capabilities, cross-functional collaborators, and the complex dependencies existing between different parts of an industrial system.
While a relatively simple personal object can sometimes be developed independently using digital manufacturing tools, a complex commercial product requires dozens of people to make mutually compatible decisions. Kumar argues for keeping the overarching user experience firmly in view while working through those messy industrial realities, rather than treating either the original conceptual idea or an early technical limitation as untouchable. Across lamps, intelligent voice services, and industrial drones, that remains the enduring responsibility of the designer: learn what the medium allows, recognize what genuinely deserves another attempt, and understand which decisions the next stage of development will have to live with.
