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The hardest part of moving from UX to hardware is committing

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A lamp takes shape through its proportions, materials, and relationship with light. A voice interface has to make sense without giving someone a screen to navigate. A drone brings physical hardware, software, and operating conditions into the same design problem. Episode 25 of Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s podcast powered by KeyShot, connects these seemingly distant territories through a conversation with designer Anshuman Kumar. Hosted by Radhika Seth, the podcast premieres every week, exploring the thinking behind creative work and the decisions that shape a designer’s practice. This episode asks a particularly useful question: what carries over when a designer moves into a field they haven’t worked in before?

Kumar has plenty of experience with that transition. His career spans sports equipment at Decathlon, lifestyle products, six years at Samsung working across areas including voice intelligence, IoT, and generative AI, and a subsequent move into UAV design at ideaForge. Alongside that professional work, he teaches and develops personal explorations such as the nature-inspired Bloom Lamp. The range makes for an engaging interview, but the conversation goes deeper than a tour through different industries. Kumar explains how earlier experiences inform later decisions, why some ideas still need the slowness of drawing, and what changes when a design can no longer be revised through a software update. Together, those observations offer a grounded account of working across disciplines.

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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 description of his career offers a useful way to understand its variety. Moving between physical products, intelligent services, and drones required new knowledge, but it didn’t make his existing experience irrelevant. Understanding a person’s needs, framing a problem, and working through uncertain possibilities remained useful across those transitions. The unfamiliar parts demanded learning rather than a wholesale replacement of his professional identity. Seen that way, a varied career becomes cumulative: each role adds another set of questions, constraints, and methods that can influence the next assignment, even when the eventual output looks entirely different.

That perspective also shapes his advice to students. Kumar recalls early encounters with electronics and science as opportunities for playful exploration, with his later education at NIFT providing a more systematic foundation. He worries about the pressure to adopt a narrowly defined professional label before those foundations have had time to develop. UX, textile design, motion design, and other specializations describe meaningful differences, but they can also become boundaries too early. His suggestion is to establish the roots before concentrating on the branches. For someone considering a change of direction, the implication is practical: examine which abilities already transfer to the new field before assuming that a different job title requires starting again from nothing.

The Bloom Lamp Translates Natural Observations Into Form

Kumar’s Bloom Lamp brings that way of connecting ideas into a physical object. Its starting points were a mushroom canopy and the spiraling movement of a small flower falling from a branch. One observation suggested a silhouette; the other introduced movement and a relationship with the surrounding air. Bringing them together required more than selecting an organic-looking outline. Kumar describes developing the lamp through multiple iterations and experiments with 3D printing, giving the concept a physical testing ground beyond visualization. “It was not just sitting as a good render,” he says. In the interview, Bloom emerges as a personal design exploration, with its interest lying in the translation from an observed natural behavior to a form that could be made.

The conversation also examines how consciously those natural references enter his work. Kumar describes room for both intuition and a deliberate framework, depending on the assignment. A commercial brief may require a closely defined direction, while a personal project can begin with an observation whose relevance becomes clearer through exploration. Intuition still needs examination, however. An appealing form has to be revisited to determine whether it communicates the intended idea and whether its proportions hold together. That qualification gives the discussion substance. Nature supplies a starting point and a vocabulary, but the designer still has to make decisions, test relationships, and recognize when an attractive reference hasn’t yet become a convincing object.

Knowing When to Move From Paper to Pixels

For Kumar, an idea that hasn’t acquired a clear direction often belongs on paper first. Drawing gives him room to discover what he is trying to make before a digital tool asks for more explicit decisions. “That slow process is very important for me to set a defined direction.” The value lies partly in the coordination between hand, eye, and thought, with each drawing helping him gain confidence in the emerging idea. Slowness has a purpose here, but it isn’t an invitation to sketch indefinitely. He also cautions against making hundreds of drawings without becoming more certain. The useful skill is recognizing when paper has answered its questions and another medium needs to take over.

Rendering enters that process as another way to investigate a design, rather than simply produce its final presentation. Discussing KeyShot, Kumar describes a working relationship between sketching, CAD, visualization, and physical prototypes that moves back and forth as questions arise. A CAD model can establish geometry while leaving the appearance of materials, textures, and surrounding surfaces unresolved. Rendering helps him examine those relationships and return to the model with a clearer intention. Physical iterations remain part of the exchange, answering questions an image cannot settle on its own. The process is less about completing a fixed sequence of stages than selecting the medium that makes the next uncertainty easier to examine and discuss.

Learning to Design Beyond the Screen

Kumar is candid about feeling scared when he joined Samsung and entered its voice intelligence group. The opportunity followed a national competition, but the assignment involved a field he hadn’t specifically trained to enter. Voice removed a familiar organizing surface: there was no screen on which to lay out every choice or explain the next step visually. Inputs could be ambiguous, and interactions had to work through a less explicit exchange. He credits mentors with helping him understand that layer and describes systems thinking as important to the transition. Eventually, a self-directed mobility project brought voice and vision intelligence together around driver assistance, progressing through Samsung’s C-Lab program, although he keeps the solution’s details confidential.

His later move to ideaForge brought those interests back into a distinctly physical setting. Kumar already enjoyed flying drones, and UAV systems offered an opportunity to connect that enthusiasm with his experience developing services around emerging technologies. Safety and security applications also contributed to the appeal. Leaving Samsung prompted disbelief from people around him, and he acknowledges the reach available within a large technology company. Still, the new role offered a combination of interests worth pursuing. The interview doesn’t unpack a particular drone or provide a technical case study of its development. Instead, it reveals the reasoning behind the move: Kumar recognized a field where several existing capabilities could become useful together, while leaving him plenty to learn.

Hardware Makes Commitment Harder to Reverse

One of the episode’s most practical exchanges begins with a hypothetical experienced fintech UX designer who wants to create physical objects for the home. Asked what that designer would need to unlearn, Kumar focuses on the expectation that a released experience can be corrected through a later update. Changing hardware may require another development cycle, a revised version, and substantial investment. Its physical form also establishes possibilities and constraints for the services that follow. This changes the timing and weight of design decisions. Experience in UX still matters, particularly in understanding people and interactions, but the new medium demands patience and a different relationship with commitment. Some choices become expensive to revisit much earlier than a software-focused designer might expect.

The same awareness of constraints shapes Kumar’s answer about creating delight. “At the same time, designers are not sitting in ivory tower, right?” An intended experience has to survive contact with technical capabilities, collaborators, and the dependencies between different parts of a system. A relatively simple personal object may be developed independently through digital manufacturing; a complex product requires many people to make compatible decisions. Kumar argues for keeping the overall experience in view while working through those realities, rather than treating either the original idea or an early limitation as untouchable. Across lamps, intelligent services, and drones, that becomes the recurring responsibility: learn what the medium allows, recognize what deserves another attempt, and understand which decisions the next stage will have to live with.

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Ressence Doesn’t Want Your Watch to Look Like a Watch

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Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s weekly podcast, premieres every week with a new guest and a single animating question: what does it actually take to think differently about a design problem. The show is 23 episodes in, and this episode turns its attention to fine watchmaking via someone who arrived in the industry with no allegiance to its conventions. If a mechanical watch didn’t exist today, and a designer received the brief cold, would they give it hands, a crown, a flat dial? That question opens the conversation and also describes exactly what our guest spent 16 years answering in practice. The result is Ressence, a brand whose watches look like nothing else on the wrist.

Benoît Mintiens is a Belgian industrial designer who, before he ever touched a watch, designed high-speed trains, aircraft cabins, medical devices, leather goods, and even hunting guns. He founded Ressence in 2010, the name a contraction of Renaissance of the Essentials. The Type Three BB2 won the 2024 Red Dot Award Best of Best, and 2026 brought the same recognition to the TMN. His watches are designed in Antwerp, made in Switzerland, produced in limited editions each year, and worn by people who believe the future is brighter than the past. He is a designer who walked into one of the world’s most convention-bound industries and simply refused to accept what he found there.

Designing from the User Outward

When people ask Benoît how he designs a watch, the answer he gives is never the one they expect, because he starts with the relation between the user and the watch rather than with the movement itself. “Usually I start not with the watch. I start with the relation between you and the watch, and that is, I think, a very important step that very often is forgotten.” Most brands were created by watchmakers who always build from the inside out, from the movement to the wearer. As a designer, Benoît works in the opposite direction, from the user inward to the movement. That physical 180-degree reversal of process changes everything about what a watch ends up looking and feeling like.

Designing the relationship is, in Benoît’s view, fundamentally an ergonomic exercise, rooted in a deep study of physiology and how people interact with objects. The ultimate measure of success is disappearance: “The best product is the one you forget when you use it. Invisible. I’m using it, but I’m not even aware of it.” He tells customers who buy a Ressence that he hopes they forget quickly that they are wearing it, and that forgetting is the proof the design worked. In the rapid-fire round, he completes the sentence “the future belongs to designers who stop asking how to make things and start asking” with five words: “How do you want to feel.” That question is where every Ressence begins.

Challenging Industry Conventions

Until the quartz crisis of the 1970s, watchmaking was about precision, quality, and reliability. When quartz movements arrived at a fraction of the cost of mechanical ones, the industry had to reinvent itself to survive. “Watchmaking has found a way to survive by adding this emotional layer on top of their brands, on top of their physical products. It’s not so much about the physical product anymore. And that’s a pity, I think, as a designer.” Any product, Benoît argues, needs to pass through the survival-of-the-fittest logic of natural evolution to reach the next generation. Watchmaking’s functional evolution largely stopped at the quartz crossroads, and Ressence is attempting to pick it up from there.

A product is defined by multiple dimensions: aesthetics, ergonomics, technique, social context, and production. In watchmaking, only the aesthetic dimension has shifted from brand to brand, and the underlying system architecture has been frozen for two hundred years. Ressence repositions every dimension at once. “The way we show the time, the ergonomics, is actually what defines the aesthetics. Is actually the way we make them. Is actually the technique that lies behind. All these things are intertwined, and they all together create what I call this new paradigm.” The whole has to be logical and coherent, or as Benoît puts it, you end up with a Frankenstein.

The Human Connection to Mechanical Objects

Asked why people still choose to wear mechanical watches when a phone tells time more accurately and without winding, Benoît offers a concept he has been developing for years. “I call it the empathy for gears. We have, as humans, we have empathy for gears.” He builds toward the idea through a Titanic thought experiment: a survivor on floating debris must choose which of two strangers in the water to save, the one he spoke with during the voyage, or the one whose language he could never understand. “As a human, you pick the one you have a relation with.” Products operate by the same logic, and we form bonds most naturally with what we can understand and relate to.

A circuit board is opaque; the workings of a mechanical watch are graspable, even to someone with no technical knowledge. “That is the magic of mechanical watches, is that we feel close to them. Let’s not forget, they tick, they make a sound. They need care. You need to wind them. All these elements will generate a bond between you and the product. And that is why I’m a strong believer in mechanical watches.” Each quality that makes a mechanical watch demanding, the winding, the servicing, the ticking, deepens the relationship between wearer and object. That depth of feeling, Benoît argues, is a human need, and it deserves to be designed for.

Ressence’s Innovations and Design Philosophy

Ressence positions itself as a high-end brand, with Benoît drawing a specific distinction between high-end and luxury. Luxury is decorative and emotional, selling prestige and story; high-end means technically and functionally sophisticated, in service of the person using it. “We would believe that a product gets its relevance, its reason of existence, through the way or the quality the product is executing its function.” The most visible outcome of that philosophy is the Ressence Orbital Convex System, or ROCS, which replaces traditional hands with rotating discs requiring approximately 200 components where a standard watch uses four. The design brief Benoît imposed on himself back in 2008, years before the brand existed, made the mandate clear from the start: “Ressence needs to be original, but not marginal.”

The oil-filled dial, defining models from the Type 3 to the Type 7, has an origin in personal memory. Benoît traces it to childhood Mediterranean sailing trips, navigating overnight to Corsica guided only by an oil-filled ship’s compass in the days before GPS. “This image of the compass, an oil-filled system with inside a mechanical thing that turns around, showing the north. I’m pretty sure this has been the thing that has burned in my brains, and I believe the idea of the Type Three must have come from there.” Oil inside the Type 5 diver eliminates refractions between oil, sapphire, water, and dive mask, delivering a clear dial at any depth. The functional improvement is exactly the point: a diver watch you can actually read underwater.

Production, Materials, and the Future

Getting enough watches from suppliers is, after 16 years of operation, still the hardest thing Ressence faces as an organization. A single watch contains around 400 custom-made parts at extreme precision tolerances, and the Ressence dial is curved in three dimensions where almost every other watch is flat, requiring five-axis machining. Some parts pass through twelve different specialized companies before reaching a watchmaker’s desk. “If today I need more watches and I order them, I will only have them in between nine months and two years. There is no industry like that.” Those lead times explain the prices, the waiting, and the limited annual runs; the scarcity is structural, a consequence of producing something this technically complex as an independent brand.

Benoît is clear-eyed about products and unhurried about brand moving forward. Ressence has a product plan mapped for the next eight years, but brand recognition is the harder work and cannot be forced. “Stick to your vision, and move on and be coherent. I think that’s the central thing.” The reference brands held up as aspirational in watchmaking took fifty years to reach that position, and it was a consequence of what they did, not something they actively pursued. On materials, Benoît describes a fascination with mammoth ivory recovered from Siberia, finding its structure “very, very, very beautiful.” Ressence can be found at ressencewatches.com, on Instagram, and in Antwerp, where visitors are always welcome.

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Do Smart Homes Need More Innovation, Or Just More Common Sense?

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Yanko Design’s Design Mindset continues to spotlight the thinkers, makers, and brands shaping the future of design. Now in Episode 23, the weekly podcast turns its attention to one of consumer tech’s most persistent frustrations: the smart home. What was meant to simplify daily life has often done the opposite, leaving users juggling apps, switches, hubs, and setup flows that feel more like maintenance than convenience. This episode, Powered by LIFX, asks a timely question: if smart homes still feel complicated, is the problem really the technology, or is it the way that technology has been designed?

The episode features three key voices from LIFX: Rachel Wilson, Creative Director; Mark Hollins, CTO; and Matthew Redding, Hardware Director. Together, they offer a layered view of the smart home from brand, engineering, and hardware perspectives, while unpacking how products like the Smart Mirror, Luna, and Smart Dimmer are being shaped around real behavior instead of feature overload. The result is a conversation about lighting, interfaces, wellness, and why the best smart technology may be the kind that quietly disappears into everyday life.

Explore LIFX Products here | Mirror | Luna | Dimmer

Why the smart home still feels harder than it should

The episode begins with a blunt acknowledgment that the smart home industry has not fully delivered on its original promise. For all the progress in connectivity and automation, many people still experience smart living as a patchwork of apps, ecosystems, and workarounds. Mark Hollins does not pin the blame on one side alone, saying, “I think it’s a mix of both,” when asked whether this is a technology failure or a design failure. His point is that the industry has spent years building around technical constraints, while users have continued to ask a much simpler question: does this actually make life easier?

That gap between capability and convenience becomes the foundation of the conversation. Hollins explains that products need to be tied back to use cases from the very beginning, rather than forcing people to adapt to whatever the technology happens to enable. It is a useful reframing, especially in a category that has often rewarded complexity as a sign of sophistication. LIFX’s position is that smart living should not feel like system management. It should feel natural, reliable, and worth having in the first place.

Designing for behavior, not just features

One of the strongest ideas in the episode is that smart home products have too often been shaped by enthusiasts rather than households. Early adopters were willing to experiment, troubleshoot, and spend time optimizing their spaces, but most homes are shared by people with very different comfort levels around technology. Hollins points out that “those users tend to have a high technical competency and a willingness to experiment,” but that often creates friction when everyone else in the home is expected to live with the result.

That is where the conversation becomes less about features and more about behavior. A connected home cannot be successful if it only works for the person who installed it. It has to make sense for partners, children, guests, and anyone else using the space. This is also why the return of physical controls matters so much. As Matthew Redding puts it, “It shouldn’t be the only way to turn on the lights,” referring to the app-first mindset that once defined the category. For LIFX, hybrid control through buttons, voice, schedules, and automation is not redundancy. It is simply better design for real life.

Why lighting needs a more emotional design language

Rachel Wilson brings a different lens to the discussion by arguing that lighting should not be treated like just another piece of consumer electronics. Too often, tech brands focus on the object itself, trying to make it look futuristic or visually distinctive without considering the room it lives in. Wilson pushes back on that approach by saying, “It’s more about the effect of the product in the space that you are living in rather than the product itself.” In other words, the value of lighting is not just in the hardware, but in how it transforms the atmosphere around it.

That shift in thinking opens up a more emotional understanding of smart lighting. Wilson describes light as something that changes how people see the objects they love, the rooms they have built, and even themselves. She also points to its biological impact, which makes lighting one of the few smart home categories that is both functional and deeply personal. That is what separates it from many other connected products in the home. Done well, lighting does not just help a room work better. It changes how the room feels.

The Smart Mirror, Luna, and the return of tactile design

That philosophy becomes more tangible in LIFX’s newer products, especially the Smart Mirror and Luna lamp. Redding explains that these are products used at arm’s reach, often in moments when people are tired, distracted, or dealing with wet hands. In those situations, reaching for a phone is not elegant, it is inconvenient. “A button’s on the mirror, it’s not a step backwards, it’s just meeting the user where they are,” he says. It is a simple line, but it captures a more mature approach to smart product design, one that chooses the right interface for the context instead of forcing the newest one.

The Smart Mirror also reflects how LIFX is trying to turn lighting into a more personal and wellness-driven experience. Wilson highlights the mirror’s “makeup check” feature, which cycles through different Kelvin temperatures so users can see how they will look in varying light conditions before stepping out. That kind of feature is specific, but not gimmicky. It solves a real everyday problem while also reinforcing the idea that lighting can support routines, rituals, and self-perception in ways that go far beyond turning a bulb on and off.

Matter, fragmentation, and the limits of interoperability

No smart home conversation today can avoid Matter, and Hollins offers a measured take on what the standard really solves. He sees it as a meaningful improvement in interoperability, onboarding, and security, especially for brands that previously had to build separate integrations for multiple ecosystems. Matter helps simplify the common ground, making it easier for products to work together across platforms without duplicating effort. That alone makes it one of the most important shifts the category has seen in years.

At the same time, Hollins is careful not to frame Matter as a magical fix for every pain point. It is not, in his words, going to create “one app to rule them all.” Some features will always live outside a shared standard, especially when brands want to build differentiated experiences. That honesty is important because it keeps the conversation grounded. Interoperability matters, but it does not replace the need for thoughtful product design, especially when homes contain multiple users, multiple habits, and multiple expectations around what smart living should feel like.

What the future of smart living should actually look like

By the end of the episode, a clearer vision of the future begins to emerge. It is not a future filled with more visible tech, more dashboards, or more complicated layers of control. Instead, it is one where smart products become quieter, more contextual, and more responsive to everyday behavior. Hollins says a smart home has done its job when it “is invisible,” while Redding describes the ideal experience as one that “just does the work for you.” Both ideas point to the same goal: intelligence that fades into the background instead of constantly demanding attention.

Wilson extends that vision even further, suggesting that the habit of “pressing buttons all the time” may gradually disappear as sensors, voice, and other natural interfaces become more robust and more affordable. If that happens, the biggest change in smart homes over the next few years may not be about adding more technology, but about making interaction feel less technical altogether. Episode 23 of Design Mindset, Powered by LIFX, makes a compelling case that the next chapter of smart living will belong to brands that understand simplicity is not basic. It is the hardest thing to design well.

Explore LIFX Products here | Mirror | Luna | Dimmer

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This Futuristic 3D-Printed Shoe Started as a Clay Sculpture

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Yanko Design’s Design Mindset podcast continues to carve out a thoughtful space for conversations around creativity, innovation, and the ideas shaping the future of design. Now at Episode 22, the weekly podcast is steadily building a strong voice of its own by focusing not just on finished products, but on the processes, philosophies, and experiments behind them. Powered by Zawa, this latest episode turns its attention to a fascinating tension in contemporary design: as AI becomes more embedded in creative workflows, where does human originality begin, and what happens when the most forward-looking idea starts with something as ancient as clay?

That question drives host Radhika Seth’s conversation with Ben Weiss, CEO of Syntilay, a company already known for pushing footwear into unfamiliar territory through AI, 3D printing, and custom-fit production. In this episode, Weiss unpacks the making of the Skin shoe, a project that began with artist Sebastian ErraZuriz sculpting directly around his foot before the form was scanned, translated, and turned into wearable footwear. The result is not just a new shoe, but a new argument for how design can begin, who gets to author it, and why technology may be most powerful when it supports human expression rather than replacing it.

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Starting with Clay Instead of Software

The most striking part of the Skin shoe story is that it did not begin with a digital tool, a design brief, or a manufacturing constraint. It began with clay in the hands of an artist, and for Ben Weiss, that starting point changed everything about the outcome. As he explains, “People kept asking us, why start with clay? Why not just open a design software and begin, you know, kind of like the typical path for making shoes. And the answer is because a computer has an idea and some predetermined steps. But when you start with an art form, it’s entirely original.” That distinction becomes the foundation of the entire episode.

Weiss makes it clear that the goal was not simply to make a shoe in an unusual way. It was to let an artist enter footwear authentically, using his own medium and instincts instead of adapting to the usual industrial process. Sebastian ErraZuriz sculpted around his own foot in a w†ay that was, as Weiss describes it, “very free flowing,” with no predetermined expectations about what a shoe should look like. That is also why the final product feels less like a sneaker and more like something anatomical, intimate, and expressive, a piece of wearable sculpture rather than a conventional consumer product.

Turning Sculpture into a Wearable, Custom Fit Shoe

Once the clay sculpture was complete, Syntilay had to solve the difficult problem of turning a tactile, hand-made object into something that could actually be worn. Weiss acknowledges that some detail is always at risk in the translation from physical object to digital file, but preserving the original character of the sculpture was a key priority throughout. “Cause you lose some detailing, but you know you try to capture it as best as you can,” he says, before noting that the final printed shoe still retains much of the fine surface texture and hand-made quality of the original piece.

What makes the process especially interesting is that the artistic form is largely preserved on the outside, while most of the personalization happens on the inside. Using more than 5,000 data points captured from a phone scan or in-person fitting, Syntilay adjusts the internal geometry of the shoe to fit each customer’s foot without distorting the sculpture itself. Weiss explains, “The key is is not changing the outside structure that much so it distorts what the shoe looks like. In this case, what this piece of art looks like on your feet, um, and while also providing a good fit experience. So most of the changes are happening on the inside.” That balance between fidelity and function is what allows the shoe to remain art-led while still being wearable.

Ben Weiss on AI, Human Craft, and What Innovation Actually Means

Although the episode title sets up a contrast between clay and AI, Weiss is not arguing against technology. His view is more layered, and more useful, because he sees AI as a tool that can support creativity without becoming the sole source of it. “AI is going to be a great augmenter, um, maybe that’s not the best word, but a great kind of helper for humans,” he says. He goes on to describe a future in which designers sometimes use tools, sometimes choose not to, and build workflows based on what makes the most sense for the idea rather than on ideology alone.

That mindset also shapes how Syntilay positions itself as a brand. Weiss points out that the company has already explored highly automated footwear, but the Skin shoe takes the opposite route by placing the human hand at the very beginning of the process. For him, the bigger point is experimentation. Footwear, he argues, has become too comfortable with minor updates, surface-level collaborations, and familiar formulas. His response is blunt and memorable: “A lot of collaborations today are new embroidery on the shoe, different colors. It’s nice, But like when you can take an actual clay sculpture that somebody made around their foot and make it something you can wear. I mean that’s next level.” Innovation, in this framing, is not about choosing between AI and craft, but about creating conditions for truly new ideas to emerge.

Storytelling, Authorship, and Why the Human Element Still Matters

One of the strongest ideas in the conversation is that the Skin shoe is not just a design object, but a story that could only exist because of its human origin. Weiss sees that as increasingly important in a design landscape crowded with AI-generated outputs and endless visual sameness. “The story of the skin shoe is is a great story,” he says, pointing to the way Syntilay documents the journey from clay sculpture to 3D file to finished shoe. For him, storytelling is not decoration added after the fact, but a core part of how a product communicates meaning and builds resonance with people.

That same human-first logic also shapes how Weiss thinks about authorship. When asked who designed the shoe, he resists reducing it to one name, instead crediting both Sebastian, who created the sculpture, and Pablo, who translated the scan into a printable product. “So I would say it’s designed by two people,” he says, acknowledging that the future of artist-led footwear may depend on this kind of collaboration between conceptual creator and technical designer. He also notes that stories like these matter because they cannot simply be fabricated by a machine, adding that “storytelling is is a really significant moat because there are some stories that AI can just doesn’t have.” In other words, the human element is not just visible in the object, but embedded in the narrative around it.

Joe Foster’s Influence and Ben Weiss’s Bigger Design Philosophy

Another compelling layer in the episode is Weiss’s reflection on working with Joe Foster, Reebok’s cofounder, whose decades of experience have shaped the way Syntilay thinks about product. Weiss describes Foster as someone who still approaches design with energy, curiosity, and a strong belief that the work should remain enjoyable. But the deeper lesson comes from Foster’s idea of “vis tech,” or visible technology, the principle that innovation should not be hidden beneath the surface. Customers should be able to look at a product and immediately understand that it is doing something different. That philosophy clearly runs through Syntilay’s work, from the pod-based structure of other models to the unmistakably sculptural silhouette of Skin.

Weiss also shares a broader set of lessons that go beyond this one project. He admits that early on, he had not fully figured out how to optimize footwear for printing cost while balancing comfort, and that learning came through iteration rather than certainty. He is equally clear about what AI companies often get wrong when entering established creative fields, saying the most common mistake is “losing the authenticity and respecting the people that come before you.” Still, his most revealing line comes near the end of the episode, when he is asked to define the future of design. His answer is simple and sharp: “It’s about giving people more opportunities to design.” That may be the clearest summary of both the Skin shoe and Syntilay’s larger ambition, opening the category to artists, creators, and new forms of authorship that conventional design systems have historically left out.

Design Mindset drops every week on Yanko Design. Catch Episode 22 in full wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Ideas Are Dead. Why Execution Matters More for Designers in 2026

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Yanko Design’s Design Mindset, powered by KeyShot, continues to carve out a thoughtful space for conversations around creativity, process, and the way design is evolving in real time. Now at Episode 21, the weekly podcast has become a compelling extension of the publication’s larger design lens, moving beyond products and visuals to focus on the people, principles, and practices shaping the creative world today. Each episode opens up a deeper look at the mindset behind modern design, asking what it really means to create with relevance in a landscape that keeps changing.

This week’s guest is Ben Fryc of Framer, a creative voice whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling, digital product thinking, and workflow design. In conversation with Radhika Sood, Ben speaks about a shift many designers are already feeling, where the role is expanding from someone who visualizes ideas to someone who can actively bring them to life. The result is a timely discussion about momentum, confidence, tools, and the growing value of designers who know how to build.

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The Gap Between Taste and Execution

Ben’s central argument lands quickly and stays with you through the rest of the episode: most creatives do not struggle with ideas, they struggle with execution. That distinction gives shape to a frustration many designers know well. The vision is there, the taste is there, and the instinct is often sharp, but the path from concept to finished outcome can still feel longer than expected. Ben attributes that gap to experience, or more specifically, the lack of enough repetition to turn instinct into capability. He speaks candidly about the misconception that strong execution should arrive early, especially for young designers stepping out of school and into the profession.

What makes his perspective resonate is the way he strips away the mythology around creative success and replaces it with something more useful. Good ideas matter, but the people who move forward are usually the ones who learn how to carry those ideas through constraints, revisions, and real-world expectations. Experience becomes the bridge between taste and output, and that bridge is built over time. In Ben’s framing, becoming a stronger designer is less about waiting for talent to click and more about putting in enough cycles of making to close the distance between what you imagine and what you can actually produce.

When Designers Start Becoming Builders

A major theme in the episode is the changing role of the designer, especially in a world where tools have made prototyping, publishing, and testing much more accessible. Ben talks about how the shift often begins the moment a designer starts thinking beyond the static mockup and becomes interested in how something actually works in motion. Once that curiosity enters the process, design starts to feel more active and more complete. The act of building no longer belongs exclusively to another team or another discipline. It becomes part of the designer’s own creative vocabulary.

Ben describes this transition almost like unlocking a new layer of ability, where confidence grows because the work can finally move out of presentation mode and into lived experience. That shift changes more than output. It changes the way a designer thinks about learning, problem-solving, and authorship. Coding, prototyping, 3D modeling, and other adjacent skills begin to feel less like optional extras and more like natural extensions of the design process. What emerges is a broader creative identity, one rooted in agency and in the satisfaction of making something real enough for others to use, experience, or respond to.

Workflow as a Creative Force

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation comes when Ben talks about workflow, not as a backstage concern but as a genuine creative advantage. He pushes back on the idea that workflow is simply a matter of optimization and instead frames it as something that shapes the quality of thinking itself. For him, a smooth workflow creates the conditions for ideas to evolve naturally, especially in projects where the final outcome only becomes clear through the act of making. That kind of process depends on iteration, room for discovery, and enough flexibility to let references, instincts, and experimentation inform the direction of the work.

He also makes an important point about communication, especially in collaborative environments where creative momentum can either build quickly or lose energy just as fast. Sharing work early, being clear about process, and inviting feedback before everything is fully polished all become part of a healthier workflow. Ben’s view is that better work often comes from showing progress sooner rather than later, because feedback strengthens the idea while it is still flexible. In that sense, workflow is not just about personal efficiency. It is also about preserving momentum, protecting creative energy, and giving ideas a better chance to grow into something stronger.

The Tools That Shape Ambition

Because Ben works at Framer, the discussion naturally moves into the role of tools, though what makes his take interesting is that he avoids reducing the conversation to features alone. He speaks instead about the feeling of a tool, how quickly it communicates its purpose, how naturally it invites experimentation, and how much friction it introduces between thought and action. In his view, the best creative tools are the ones that feel legible early on, even if they reveal more depth over time. Complexity can have value, but approachability matters because it determines whether someone begins with curiosity or hesitation.

That idea becomes especially relevant in the context of today’s no-code and low-friction creative platforms, which have changed what designers can realistically attempt on their own. Ben notes that when tools lower the barrier to making, people often become more ambitious because the path from idea to execution feels more direct. Instead of getting lost in abstraction, they can start building, testing, and refining with greater immediacy. The result is not just speed for its own sake, but a more intentional creative process where the tool amplifies possibility and supports the designer’s ability to act on instinct while learning along the way.

Why Shipping Changes the Designer

The episode closes on a note that feels especially relevant for creatives who spend too long refining, adjusting, and waiting for the right moment to release something. Ben speaks honestly about perfectionism and how easily it can interrupt momentum, especially when creators become so focused on improving the work that they never let it exist in the world. His answer is not careless speed, but a healthier relationship with progress. Making something real, even in an imperfect form, creates a kind of confidence that reflection alone cannot produce. The act of shipping becomes a turning point because it changes how the creator sees their own role.

That is ultimately what gives this conversation its energy. Ben is not presenting building as a trend layered on top of design, but as a deeper evolution in how designers participate in their own ideas. Once something moves from concept to reality, even on a small scale, it carries a different weight. It becomes proof of capability, proof of momentum, and proof that taste can be translated into action. For a weekly podcast like Design Mindset, that kind of conversation feels exactly on point, because it captures the creative shift defining this moment. Designers today are being asked to do more than imagine. They are being invited to make.

Design Mindset drops every week on Yanko Design. Catch Episode 19 in full wherever you listen to podcasts. For a free trial of KeyShot, visit keyshot.com/mindset.

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The post Ideas Are Dead. Why Execution Matters More for Designers in 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Why Most AI Productivity Tools Still Fail After the Meeting

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Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s weekly podcast powered by HiDock this week, it is 20 episodes in and showing no signs of slowing down. Hosted by Radhika Seth, the show premieres every week with conversations that dig into the minds behind the products shaping how we work, create, and communicate. This episode brings in a guest who fits that mission precisely.

Sean Song is the founder and product lead of HiDock, a company with deep roots in audio DSP engineering whose technology has powered over 500,000 devices across smart homes, automotive, and enterprise communication systems. Their hardware, the HiDock P1, rethought how professionals capture conversations through their own earbuds, with no bots, no awkward announcements, no friction. With HiNotes 3.0, the team has made a far more ambitious move, tackling the part of the productivity problem the industry has largely left untouched. Sean thinks about productivity the way a designer thinks about systems, as a behavioral architecture challenge, and that’s exactly what this conversation gets into.

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The Productivity Paradox and Cognitive Load

Sean opens the episode with a number that should stop anyone mid-scroll: research suggests that almost 44% of action items are missed after meetings. His argument is that the tools built to fix this have been solving the wrong problem entirely. “We have built some of the most sophisticated recording and transcription technology and products in history, and we are still leaving meetings with a list of things we never act on,” he says. “I come to believe that the real productivity crisis was never about capturing, never about transcription. It is all about what happens in the silence after the meeting.”

What makes this more than a product pitch is the neurological framing Sean brings to it. Meetings, in his view, are among the most computationally heavy tasks the human brain performs, comparable to driving, because vision, hearing, and real-time language generation are all running simultaneously. “It’s duplex, it’s fully duplex. I output, I input, I output, I input and my brain is calculating my next word. It’s just like the large language model predicting the next token.” After a long meeting, your brain is, as he puts it, “out of sugar.” Taking accurate notes under those conditions is genuinely hard, and executing on them afterward, when you’re already depleted, is harder still.

The Evolution of Productivity Tools and Product Philosophy

HiDock spent years building enterprise communication tools, and for a long time the assumption was simple: deliver clear audio, solid recording, and eventually a clean AI-generated summary, and the job is done. Sean’s reckoning with that assumption came from a place that was personal before it was professional. He describes being a devoted “GTD guy” since the late 1990s, carrying the Get Things Done philosophy across every platform from Palm to BlackBerry to iPhone. “After years of being a GTD guy, it helped nothing to my career. I didn’t perform better. I didn’t achieve more.” The tools were fine. The system was the problem.

That realization resurfaced when Sean was using HiNotes and recognized the same pattern playing out again in his own product. “A good transcription is not enough. A good summary is not enough. Taking notes is not enough. We need to extract the pearls inside the notes and help the user to manage after the meeting.” From there, the team’s design focus shifted from delivering beautiful text to understanding what users were actually trying to accomplish, which was getting work done across the full arc of a meeting’s life, including the silence that follows it.

Design Principles for Effective Productivity Tools

One of the most interesting distinctions Sean draws is between consumption apps and productivity apps, and why the design logic that works beautifully for one actively undermines the other. For consumption, he says, “laziness wins. Always, like social apps, Snapchat, picture apps. You just do one click, everything done.” For productivity, his position is the opposite. “Discipline wins. Because this is another belief that guides me to build everything, HiDock and HiNotes, which keeps human in the loop.” The principle runs through every hardware and software decision the team makes. Physical actions like a key push or a long hold are built in deliberately, because that tiny moment of effort is what creates cognitive ownership of the information being captured.

Context sits alongside discipline as a guiding force. The story behind HiNotes 3.0’s timestamp-linked action items came from a dinner at a traditional omakase restaurant in Japan. Months later, what Sean remembered from the experience was a conversation with the chef about his training and his master. The food itself had faded. “So this brought to me that we should not only give the user a to-do, we need to give the user the context.” The visual architecture of the software reflects the same thinking: a consistent three-pane interface, maintained even when only two panels are logically needed, because the stability reduces cognitive load and builds what Sean calls “solid reliability” over time.

HiNotes 3.0

Capturing Creativity and Fragmented Ideas

Scheduled brainstorming, Sean argues, is one of the less honest myths in modern work culture. “Many brainstorm meetings do not generate good ideas. Good ideas came from when you walk, when you drive. And when you swim or after you swim, when you’re taking a shower, those are creative moments.” The friction of capturing an idea in those moments, unlocking a large phone, finding the right app, waiting for it to load, is enough to kill the thought entirely. Whisper Notes was built around precisely that gap: an instant, low-friction way to record ideas wherever they arrive, with HiNotes 3.0 handling the synthesis, pulling scattered voice recordings from across the day into a single coherent summary.

The question of which AI model does that synthesizing led HiDock to a decision that runs counter to most of the industry. HiNotes 3.0 gives users access to seven frontier models including GPT, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini Pro, switchable on a per-meeting basis. Most tools make a single model choice and bury it. Sean’s reasoning comes back to the human-in-the-loop philosophy: “Different content may require different summarization, even may require different characteristic values of the large language models.” He describes Claude as “probably more philosophical and decent and pays attention to details,” Gemini as “probably more creative and probably more up to date,” and frames the act of selecting a model as a form of intentional engagement with the content. The effort, for Sean, is always the point.

Whisper Note Aggregation

Rapid Fire Round: Quick Takes

The rapid fire round is where Sean’s worldview comes through in its most concentrated form. His pick for the most overrated productivity tool is AI agent tools, marketed as capable of everything but, in his experience, delivering nothing meaningful for most people in practice. The habit he’d want every professional to adopt is “check alignment,” a ritual he runs after every meeting and town hall: “Do I make myself understood? Are we on the same goal?” His most honest moment in the segment comes when asked about his own biggest follow-through failure. Leading a 50-person startup, he has missed the personal onboarding of roughly 15 new employees despite having promised himself he would handle it himself.

On what hardware design understands that software consistently ignores, his answer is immediate: “Tactile and sensation matters. So you cannot just build a piece of plastic or a piece of metal. Even plastic or metal, there are textures, there are tactile sensation feelings that connect you and your consumers.” The one thing he would strip from modern meetings is social distance, the polite friction that slows down directness and alignment. Asked for the single greatest enemy of execution in one word, his answer lands as a kind of provocation: notes. As he puts it, “as long as you take notes, it helps you execute.” Coming from the founder of a meeting intelligence company, it is both a confession and a design brief rolled into one.

Design Mindset drops every week on Yanko Design. For anyone looking to go deeper into HiNotes 3.0 and the hardware that brings it to life, have a look here.

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Ex-BlackBerry Designer Is Calling Out Everything That’s Wrong With Modern Phones

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Design Mindset is Yanko Design’s weekly podcast, powered by KeyShot, the 3D rendering and visualization software that helps designers test how products feel, not just how they look. Hosted by Radhika Seth, the show goes deep into the philosophy and process behind world-class products, sitting down with the designers and founders who actually built them. Episode 19, premiering this week, is one of the most thought-provoking conversations the series has produced yet.

Joseph Hofer is the founder of Hofer Studio, where he consults with hardware entrepreneurs on building profitable, world-class product portfolios. Before that, he spent over a decade at BlackBerry as senior industrial designer, establishing the look and feel of the iconic Bold family and shaping devices like the Q10, Z10, and the BlackBerry Passport. His work spans over sixty design and utility patents, touching products that have sold over twenty-one million units and generated upward of $3.1 billion in revenue. More recently, he’s been the design force behind the Clicks Communicator, a physical-keyboard phone that launched at CES and challenges the smartphone status quo from the ground up.

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Designing Within Human Limits and Intentional Use

Joseph opens the conversation with something that sounds almost poetic but lands with the weight of a core design principle, saying that “most of the objects we use every day quietly train us. They teach us how to hold them, how long to focus, how patient we need to be. When design ignores human limits, it drains us. When design respects them, it almost feels like care.” He critiques what he calls “sticky” experiences, the kind that benefit companies at users’ expense, arguing that the real question designers should be asking is whether a product helps people become a better version of themselves, or whether the company simply wins after ten years of draining them.

His case against the modern smartphone is pointed. Everything phones have become reactionary devices, he says, describing the experience of opening one to send an email and somehow finding yourself fifteen minutes deep in a reel, asking yourself how you got there. Big tech, in his view, has deliberately shaped products to increase screen time and sell more through ads. His philosophy runs in the opposite direction: good design should prompt intention before action, not exploit the absence of it.

Integration as Core Design Principle

One of the more revealing details Joseph shares early on is that at BlackBerry, the design team’s official title wasn’t “Industrial Design.” It was Design Integration. That framing stayed with him. “Integration is probably the word, the action that I look to do well in every project I work on,” he says, adding that a product can be really strong in one area but fall flat in others if you’re only focused on a single dimension. Great design, strong UX, and poor profit economics don’t add up to a sustainable company. Economics, manufacturing, cost, and complexity all have to be part of the thinking from the start.

His advice to technical founders reflects the same logic. Many of them start with a breakthrough innovation and then go looking for a market to push it into, which he sees as working in the wrong direction. The better path is to step back, clearly analyze the problem bubbling up from the market, shape an experience that solves it, and then let the technology marry with that. Letting one run too far ahead of the other is how good innovations end up as products nobody uses.

The Clicks Communicator: Intentional Mobile Interaction

The Clicks Communicator is the most direct physical expression of Hofer’s philosophy. It was the first phone he designed in ten years after BlackBerry, and the central idea is a complete inversion of how smartphones currently work. Rather than an app grid that presents notifications and pulls users in reactively, the Communicator prompts users to decide what they want to do first, then acts on it. Physical keys map to intentional shortcuts: pressing K calls a specific contact, pressing I opens Instagram only when the user has consciously chosen to. “It flips it from being reactionary to intentional,” Joseph says simply.

He’s also clear that the product’s appeal isn’t nostalgia. A lot of the customers aren’t even BlackBerry users, he notes; they’re younger people who simply want a different relationship with their mobile device. The Communicator sits within what he sees as a broader 2025 trend of “intentional tech,” products designed to decouple from the everything-phone model and serve one specific purpose well. Adding a 3.5mm headphone jack and a removable SD card wasn’t feature-stacking for its own sake either; those choices are signals to a specific audience that the team is listening and cares about them.

Recognizing Quiet Ideas and Process Discipline

When Radhika points out that the BlackBerry keyboard now feels like it was always inevitable, Hofer pushes back immediately. “Sometimes these quiet ideas that feel obvious or become obvious actually took a lot of effort and iteration to get there,” he says, describing the motto his team lived by: think, build, test. The keyboard’s evolution wasn’t a single stroke of insight; it was a response to real constraints. As iPhones pushed screens larger, BlackBerry faced intense pressure to shrink keypads, which meant switching from oval keys to square ones, losing the tactile separation users relied on. The innovation was subtle: raising a curved edge on each square key to preserve the feeling of the oval, essentially hiding a reference to the old shape inside the new form. Speed tests, accuracy tests, user sentiment on different options, all of that grinding iteration is what produced something that feels natural.

He applies the same thinking to simplicity broadly. Designing for a ten-year-old, he argues, is one of the most useful principles any designer or founder can adopt. If you can’t explain the product to a ten-year-old, it’s too complicated. He tested this literally the night before the recording, sitting down with his eight-year-old daughter to ask about her CD player. Her answer was that it had way too many buttons. Her ideal? Three: power, volume up, volume down. Six identical-feeling buttons with in-mold graphics that disappear in the dark told a clear story about what the designers had gotten wrong.

Restraint as Confidence and Commercial Strategy

The tension between restraint and visibility is something Hofer takes seriously. He doesn’t frame minimalism as a virtue in itself. “Clarity is actually an even stronger word,” he says, arguing that a vanilla product solving a vanilla problem will simply go unnoticed. The goal isn’t to be quiet; it’s to solve a real, specific problem so well that the product becomes the only answer for a particular group of people. A phrase he came up with captures where he’s trying to take the companies he works with: from viral products to vital ones, products that customers genuinely need in their lives because of the difference they’ve made.

That philosophy maps directly onto commercial outcomes. A product that meets the emotional and functional needs of a user, reduces cognitive load, lasts longer, and has lower return rates naturally builds a brand that draws people in without needing to be aggressively sold. “When products are just better,” he notes, “they need to be marketed and sold maybe less. That’s an effect on your bottom line.” His work at Hofer Studio is less about crafting beautiful objects and more about asking founders what commercial success actually means to them and building backwards from that.

When the rapid-fire round asks him to describe restraint in design in a single word, his answer arrives without hesitation: confidence. “What does obviousness create? It creates confidence. I know how to enter this experience. I know how to start this product. I feel more confident with it in my life.” It’s a fitting close to a conversation that consistently returned to the same idea: that the design decisions nobody notices are usually the ones that took the most care to make.

Design Mindset drops every week on Yanko Design. Catch Episode 19 in full wherever you listen to podcasts. For a free trial of KeyShot, visit keyshot.com/mindset.

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The post Ex-BlackBerry Designer Is Calling Out Everything That’s Wrong With Modern Phones first appeared on Yanko Design.

“Stop Treating Designers as Tools”: Ayush Singh on Ownership, Burnout and Speaking Up in Indian Brands

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Yanko Design’s weekly podcast, Design Mindset, continues to bring raw, unfiltered conversations about what it really means to work in design today. Episode 18, Powered by KeyShot, tackles a topic many Indian designers experience but rarely discuss openly: the uncomfortable gap between what brands promise about design investment and what actually happens behind closed doors. Each week, the podcast peels back the layers of design practice, exploring not just the creative work but the professional realities that shape it.

This week’s guest, Ayush Singh Patel, brings a perspective shaped by years at the intersection of ambition and reality. Currently Associate Director of Industrial Design at Noise, where he leads audio and accessories categories, Ayush previously spent time at boAt Lifestyle, leading five sub-brands and contributing to the design of everything from wireless headphones to smartwatches to grooming products. His experience spans the full product lifecycle, from concept to launch, but more importantly, he’s navigated the complex dynamics of being an in-house designer in India’s explosive consumer tech ecosystem. What unfolds in this conversation is a candid examination of derivative design, creative ownership, and what it takes to push for genuine innovation when the system is built for speed and cost efficiency.

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From “Glorified Localization” to Building Design Credibility

The conversation opens with a striking admission from Ayush: “I joined brands that proudly call themselves design driven, expecting to lead innovation. Instead, I found myself in meetings where the brief was literally make it look like this western brand, but make it cheaper. That’s not design leadership, that’s glorified localization. The real question isn’t whether Indian brands invest in design. It’s whether they invest in their own design vision or just outsource the thinking and ask internal teams to clean up the execution.”

Ayush’s own hiring story reveals how this dynamic begins. He wasn’t selected for his industrial design expertise or technical knowledge. “All they liked was the kind of portfolio work that I put out on Instagram and Behance, and they liked those pretty images. So there was no technicality in my interviews. They just wanted that sort of outcome for their products.” It took nearly a year and a half to convince stakeholders of what he could actually contribute beyond aesthetics. His first real opportunity came through rendering. In 2018-2019, e-commerce was entirely image-based, and conceptual renders performed exceptionally well. “Anything that was sold online on platforms like Amazon or Flipkart was truly image-based, right? Everything was about how glorified of a concept you can showcase.” The results were immediate: sales increased because customers were convinced to buy what they perceived in those images, not the reality of the products. This success created the opening for deeper design involvement.

The Strategic Path from CMF to Original R&D

Once sales growth validated design’s commercial impact, Ayush introduced CMF (Color, Material, Finish) as the next frontier. “I came and said there’s a thing called CMF design. So you can start with something as small as color. You don’t have to pay a lot of money, you can talk to the Chinese manufacturers, you can add those colors. And then obviously, it will change the game completely, because now people will have more options to buy from.” The Indian market’s aesthetic inexperience became an advantage. Consumers were looking for cheap technology that looked different, and without established reference points for good or bad aesthetics, bold CMF choices stood out on crowded e-commerce platforms.

The impact was substantial. “Through colors, we crossed over that thing where design can be weighed down, not in terms of aesthetics, but colors. And that’s what made the company grow from almost 90 crore revenue to 200-300 crore revenue.” The next step involved tweaking aesthetics of Chinese-sourced products with small mold modifications. “The reception from the customers was bonkers. It did not lead to as much sales because obviously it drove the costs a little high. But the way people understood that there’s something beyond buying a product from China and launching it, they saw in and out development, right? Someone cared about every bit of visuals that went out. There were specific colorways, people were somehow glorifying luxuriousness.” This gradual proof of concept finally convinced leadership to commit resources. From 2022 onwards, the company began developing its own products, marking a shift from localization to original design.

“Think Inside the Box”: Design Process for Fast-Paced Markets

Ayush’s philosophy directly contradicts traditional design education. “I’ll say something controversial here. Since design school, you’re somehow pushed to think outside the box, which is obviously a place where you can actually drive some sort of innovation. But if you work in a company that’s going for mass production, catering to large audiences at a fast pace, these consumers are not normal consumers. They’re not faithful to you. There are so many brands in the same market, so you have to innovate as fast as possible. And obviously, if you understand the market, innovation comes with time.” The solution challenges design orthodoxy: “The shortest way for you to reach innovation is change the outer aesthetics. If you think outside the box, you incur a lot of R&D costs. That will go through numerous approvals, numerous discussions back and forth from your manufacturing units. And that’s basically a lead time of one and a half to two years. In that time, there’ll be five to ten competitors who will come and go.”

The practical framework becomes clear: “We realized it’s a place where we need to set up our process in which we think inside the box, because an earphone or a speaker will look like an earphone or speaker. That’s the example I give to any person I ever hired. If you’re trying to design a car, it will look like a car. You cannot make it look like a plane.” The design process itself had to be restructured to bypass sketching and go straight to 3D. “There’s no point for us to sit down and make a sketch and me going to a founder who has nothing to do with the design process, who doesn’t care about why it takes you so much time. He only cares about: have you made something for me that I can produce.” Perhaps most revealing is Ayush’s assessment of what the job actually entails: “Design is the easy job. Design is literally five percent of what I actually do. Ninety-five percent is, irrespective of whether it’s a design by me or my team, I have to go and meet so many people from different teams who don’t care about what it took you to make this design. And just go there and be open-ended to receiving any kind of feedback and just sell that design. Being a great designer doesn’t mean you can design something, it’s how well you can sell it to other people.”

The Copy-Paste Reality and Cultivating Real Creativity

The copy-paste culture creates fundamental challenges for original work. “When there’s no good design, there’s no bad design, then there’s only the design that is known. So what you see is what you can weigh. Any person who’s beyond design will never be able to appreciate that as something new. And for a company that’s super price-critical, for a company that wants to innovate every six months, they’ll only want a bet that’s tried and tested.” When given explicit instructions to copy, Ayush developed a strategy of creative resistance: “I’ll be put in a position by a certain CXO or member I’m reporting to, basically laid out saying copy this. And I would come up being smart enough, trying to make a window, and I’d say okay, I’ll copy this, but I’ll give you my understanding of what it should look like. And then I would be basically thrashed, and they would say no, I told you to copy this. So I would end up going as close as it is to the inspiration, but I was still trying to stay away from it. The winning situation for me is how well can I sell that this looks like that, but it’s not the same, but this will work for you.”

The impact on designers working in these environments is profound. “We’re basically finishing up all the resources left for aesthetics, because there’s no innovation to back it up, right? So there will be a time where I’ll end up using all the innovations in terms of CMF at that given price tag. And the next people who take my position will not have anything left to innovate on. The people who I hire as interns or full-timers will come and explore the same thing that we did three years back. You’re following the same pathway that I did ten years back or five years back. So you’re bound to make the same mistakes to reach there.” His advice to his team reflects the only path he’s found to sustained growth: “The only way you can cultivate creativity is by doing something beyond what you’re getting paid for. I would just ask these people working with me to spend more time outside. The real work for a designer begins after the nine to five. Once you go back home, the kind of people you interact with, the kind of platforms you sit on, maybe Yanko Design, maybe Behance, any platforms that can somehow make you ask a question. People used to ask me, how are you able to execute things so fast? I optimized my working by making so many mistakes in my personal projects that I can go to my office next morning and do the same thing in half an hour.”

Speaking Up: From Skill to Creator

For Ayush, the path to changing the industry starts with designers finding their voice. “I think for designers to speak up. In a room, I’ve been the biggest introvert my entire life. But I realized if I don’t speak up, no one will care about design. And it’s on the place of basically shouting design, not just talking about it. Being in a place where you can speak up, and just taking that narrative, just start with being the face of design in the company. Maybe you’re in a junior role or a senior role, start sharing opinions. Even the people working within my team at the moment are very shy in terms of sharing opinions to a founder or to a person from a different team. They’ll slide in my DMs and say, this is what I feel. And I say you should be open about it. If you don’t share it, they will never respect your opinions.”

The fundamental shift needed is in how designers are perceived. “At the moment, designers are seen as skills rather than creators. That’s the one narrative that I’m completely against and I try to push off. People should start seeing you as creators, because if they believe you’re a skill, then they’ll always try to guide you to do a certain thing, maybe copying designs or just following exactly what they’re asking you to do. In that process, you’ll burn out faster than anything because you’re trying to follow someone else’s vision of something. You’re just becoming a tool in between. Better than being a tool, you become a creator when you start speaking out and defending everything you’ve learned.” When challenged to prove an in-house team could outperform an expensive European consultancy, Ayush’s answer centers on empathy and collaboration: “An in-house team can always win through a solution which I call just talking to people. Any person who’s somehow involved in the process, if you truly talk to them and empathize and learn their side of work in the process, then you can create a solution that’s not only good-looking but also satisfying their needs.” His mentoring philosophy distills to a single essential quality: “The cheat sheet is, how much do you love it? That’s the biggest cheat sheet. If you’re not in love with it in India, you will not sustain. And a love beyond boundaries, a love that cannot be sacrificed, a love that you never turn away from.”

The conversation reveals an uncomfortable truth about design investment in India’s fast-growing consumer tech sector. The issue isn’t whether companies use the word “design” in their marketing or mission statements. The question is whether they empower internal teams to think or simply execute, whether they’re building design capabilities or just design departments. Ayush’s journey from rendering specialist to R&D leader demonstrates that change is possible, but it requires designers to be strategists, salespeople, and advocates as much as creatives. It demands proving commercial value repeatedly, speaking up even when it’s uncomfortable, and cultivating skills outside of work hours that will never appear in any job description.

For designers navigating similar environments, Ayush’s experience offers both validation and a roadmap. The constraints are real, the frustrations legitimate, but within those limitations, there’s still room to push boundaries, build trust, and gradually shift the conversation from “make it cheaper” to “make it ours.” You can connect with Ayush on LinkedIn or book a mentoring session with him on ADPList, where he’s been recognized as one of the top ten mentors multiple times.

Design Mindset premieres every week, bringing honest conversations about what it really takes to build a design career in today’s industry. Episode 18 is Powered by KeyShot, the 3D rendering and visualization software helping in-house design teams compete with the visual quality of global agencies.

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The post “Stop Treating Designers as Tools”: Ayush Singh on Ownership, Burnout and Speaking Up in Indian Brands first appeared on Yanko Design.

iF Design Award Makes Sustainability 20% of Your Score: What Designers Need to Know in 2026

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Yanko Design’s podcast, Design Mindset, continues to bring compelling conversations with design leaders who are shaping the future of the industry. Powered by KeyShot, the show premieres weekly, offering listeners deep dives into the minds of innovators, strategists, and visionaries. Episode 15 tackles one of the most critical shifts happening in design today: how sustainability has moved from a nice-to-have checkbox to a core measure of design excellence itself.

This week’s guest is Lisa Gralnek, a brand builder with 25 years of experience who currently serves as U.S. Managing Director and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact for iF Design, a respected member of the international design community since 1953 and host of the prestigious iF Design Award. Lisa’s journey spans work with giants like Adidas and the Boston Consulting Group, giving her a unique vantage point on how sustainability has evolved from corporate afterthought to design imperative. In this conversation, she reveals how one of the world’s most prestigious design competitions is fundamentally redefining what “good design” means.

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Embedding Sustainability into iF Design’s Evaluation Framework

When asked about the decision to make sustainability one-fifth of the iF Design evaluation framework, Lisa shared her pride in the initiative. iF Design has been operating since 1954 and now spans nine disciplines across 93 categories, from product and packaging to branding communications, UX, UI, service systems, architecture, and interior architecture. The shift was deliberate and structural: iF Design moved from a general “impact” criterion to explicitly isolating environmental and social sustainability as 20% of the score. Commercial impact was repositioned into differentiation, one of their five criteria, allowing them to “really single out the environmental and social ramifications of a design.” This alignment reflects the iF Design Foundation’s core mission to advance design for a better world.

The design thinking process involved convening a Sustainability Working Group of eight experts from around the world who bring deep, often sector-specific sustainability expertise. “We work together to figure out what is the process, what is the questions, what are the certifications and accreditations we’re acknowledging, as well, most importantly, I would say, of supporting the jurors as they go through this process as well,” Lisa explained. The group co-developed processes, discipline-specific optional questions, recognized certifications and accreditations, and on-site juror support aimed at consistency, rigor, and education for both entrants and jurors. This collaborative approach ensures that sustainability evaluation remains both credible and practical across vastly different design categories.

Distinguishing Authentic Impact from Greenwashing

One of the biggest challenges facing any sustainability evaluation is distinguishing genuine innovation from performative claims. Lisa explained how the first year revealed significant gaps: jurors felt skeptical not about sustainability itself but about making accurate judgments with insufficient information. At that first jury, sustainability experts were on the ground for only the second year, and the feedback was clear. Entrants weren’t providing enough detail in the character-limited impact field for jurors to make informed decisions, whether they were discussing environmental impact, social impact, or business impact.

The solution was to embed three optional questions into every discipline, sometimes tailored at the category level, along with a selectable list of objective global, regional, and industry-led certifications. These questions remain optional because iF’s mandate focuses on rewarding good design rather than punishing inadequate submissions. Lisa gave a concrete example of how this helps identify hollow claims: when a television or computer monitor entry discusses sustainable packaging in the sustainability field, it raises red flags because the entry itself is about the product, not the packaging. In packaging specifically, iF piloted requesting a bill of materials (BOM) or digital product passport (DPP) to quickly validate claims about recycled content, compostability, low-impact inks, and water-saving processes. Interestingly, packaging entries dipped this year, raising the question of whether increased scrutiny discouraged greenwashing or simply affected submission rates.

“Fewer, Better” as a Design and Consumption Ethos

Lisa’s philosophy around sustainable design cuts to the heart of overconsumption. She candidly admitted that if she were being a radical sustainabilityist, “none of us needs anything. None of us needs anything anymore.” She recalled an interview on The Economist after the 2008 financial collapse where experts insisted people needed to buy, that society needed to incentivize consumption. But consuming our way out of financial collapse, she argues, represents the capitalistic model and business operating system of the world without necessarily serving the planet or people. Her first jury experience brought this reality into sharp focus: walking into the warehouse where 50% of the 10,000 to 12,000 annual entries are physically displayed, she burst into tears. The sheer volume of stuff human beings create, all in service of capitalism’s engine, became overwhelming when viewed through a sustainability lens.

So what does “fewer, better” actually mean in practice? Lisa explained it operates on two levels: individual conscious consumption choices and organizational design decisions. At the designer and company level, it means thinking through the circular R ladder: what can we refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, refurbish, or resale? “Fewer, better is like, I think it’s less extractive and more regenerative,” she explained. This approach shifts the entire paradigm from novelty-driven production cycles to necessity-driven design that prioritizes extending product lifecycles and reducing resource pressure. Even digital alternatives and AI, which some propose as solutions, carry their own massive environmental footprints, making the “fewer, better” ethos essential regardless of the medium.

The Shift from “Nice-to-Have” to Imperative

Lisa has been passionate about sustainability since early in her career, leaving fashion after nine years because she’d lost appreciation for the craft amid the luxury sector’s excesses. She attended graduate school intending to return and work on sustainability in luxury, but graduated into the 2008 financial collapse when sustainability wasn’t even a conversation starter. Her time at Boston Consulting Group revealed the depth of corporate resistance: she vividly remembers asking a snack food company CEO about greening their packaging supply chain at a luncheon and being laughed at by both the CEO and a senior partner. Whether the dismissal stemmed from her being a young woman among older men or the sheer absurdity they perceived in the question, she witnessed this pattern repeatedly across retail, travel and tourism, consumer packaged goods, and fashion. The consistent message: sustainability is awesome, so long as it doesn’t cost margin or sales.

Yet Lisa sees a significant shift happening now, driven primarily by consumers. Awareness of climate change, planetary degradation, and social unfairness has grown dramatically, particularly as social media makes information more accessible regardless of which news sources people consume. Most people globally now recognize there’s a problem and understand that action is needed. There’s also a compelling business case, as demonstrated by Walmart’s LED transition 15 to 18 years ago. Despite enormous upfront costs to change every light bulb in every warehouse and retail store, the head of sustainability reported a payback period of just three and a half weeks in energy savings. “So often you just need to make the change and people are so scared and teams are so siloed and you know people are afraid like you can’t be afraid and the business case is almost oh almost always there to do better,” Lisa observed.

Technology’s Double-Edged Sword: E-Waste and Hope

When asked about sustainable design trends she wished would disappear, Lisa pointed to a concerning paradox: our increasing dependence on technology. E-waste is burying us, with most electronic waste filled with rare earths that are extremely difficult to mine and controlled by very few players. This issue increasingly surfaces in geopolitical conversations and international trade negotiations yet remains underrepresented in sustainability discourse. Lisa referenced a presentation at South by Southwest where visuals showed the number of dump trucks filled with e-waste every hour that the world creates and deposits into landfills. These landfills poison water sources and ground soil, creating massive downstream pollution and health impacts. Everything exciting and technological, while representing the direction the world is heading, simultaneously presents this enormous environmental problem.

Yet within this challenge lies genuine hope. Lisa expressed excitement about the increase in repairability, recyclability, upgradability, and upcyclability in electronics, whether discussing car batteries, e-bike batteries, mobile phones, speakers, or computer interfaces. The momentum isn’t moving fast enough and integration remains incomplete, but the trajectory points toward keeping electronics in use longer and reducing waste. This trend represents designers and companies genuinely rethinking product lifecycles and moving away from planned obsolescence. Lisa’s realistic optimism captures the mindset she sees among sustainability leaders across disciplines: they’re very realistic about where we are and where we’ve been, but they’re willing to fight for transformation in the future. They recognize that future transformation only becomes possible when action starts today, with imperfect solutions, uncomfortable conversations, and puzzle pieces that contribute to a larger systemic change.

Design Mindset, Powered by KeyShot, premieres every week with new conversations exploring the minds shaping the future of design. Listen to the full episode with Lisa Gralnek to hear more insights on sustainability and how it plays a pivotal role in shaping iF Design’s outlook.

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The post iF Design Award Makes Sustainability 20% of Your Score: What Designers Need to Know in 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Instagram vs Impact: How Design Awards Separate Digital Noise from Real Value

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Yanko Design’s new podcast, Design Mindset, continues to bring fresh perspectives from design leaders around the world. Every week, this series (Powered by KeyShot) explores critical questions shaping the future of design, from recognition and validation to the evolving role of awards in our digital age. Episode 15 tackles a particularly timely subject: whether design awards still hold relevance when every designer has Instagram, Behance, and LinkedIn at their fingertips.

Jova Zec, Vice President of Red Dot Awards, joins host Radhika Seth for a candid discussion about the changing landscape of design recognition. As the second generation leading one of the world’s most prestigious design competitions (founded by his father, Professor Dr. Peter Zec), Jova brings a unique vantage point on how awards have transformed over three decades, from insider validation to global influence. He’s actively reshaping what recognition means in 2025 and beyond, viewing it as a responsibility rather than simply a reward.

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From Visibility to Validation: What Awards Mean Now

Jova recalls a time when getting recognized meant appearing on TV or in newspapers. For designers especially, having their own platform was nearly impossible. But now, with Instagram profiles and countless social media options, the landscape has completely changed. This shift has fundamentally altered what design awards need to offer the creative community.

The focus has pivoted from providing visibility to providing qualification. Awards have evolved from megaphones to validators, from amplifiers to authenticators. Jova explains that nowadays, the emphasis lies on being qualified by Red Dot as somebody who produces something that carries genuine value, helping designers prove that their work matters beyond popularity metrics. In a world drowning in content, expert validation proves that a designer’s work holds timeless value beyond digital noise.

The Four Qualities That Separate Impact from Noise

Red Dot evaluates submissions based on four core qualities: functionality, use, responsibility, and seduction. Interestingly, Jova highlights seduction as perhaps the most important. This quality creates the emotional connection that makes consumers genuinely want a product. While functionality and responsibility might seem self-explanatory, seduction is what really drives desire and adoption in the marketplace.

This evaluation approach allows Red Dot to look past short-term viral gimmicks that might rack up likes online. The judges evaluate products on timeless criteria that have remained consistent across the award’s history. Washing machines, for instance, might all look similar to casual observers, but there’s often extraordinary design work happening in the details. Quality never changes; it’s about the experience. If you experience a quality moment with a product, that experience stays the same whether it happened 50 years ago or will happen 100 years from now.

Meta-Categories: Recognizing Invisible Excellence

One of Red Dot’s most significant evolutions has been the introduction of meta-categories. While core principles remain constant, these categories allow Red Dot to highlight specific aspects of design that deserve elevation. The innovative category, for example, recognizes technologically advanced ideas that may lack polish but carry revolutionary potential. Red Dot has also introduced a sustainability meta-category to encourage environmental responsibility.

When Radhika presents Jova with a hypothetical scenario (a sustainable packaging startup with genuinely innovative biodegradable materials that’s technically brilliant but doesn’t photograph beautifully), his response perfectly illustrates this approach. Such a product would win both the innovative award for finding a solution that could revolutionize the industry and the sustainability award for its environmental impact. Winners of these meta-category awards then gain access to a network that includes experts in visual and seductive design, fostering collaboration that can yield products blending sustainable innovation with high aesthetic quality. Leaving such innovation unrecognized is never an option.

Validation Matters at Every Career Stage

The conversation turns personal when discussing how recognition affects designers differently throughout their careers. Jova’s observation is insightful: the importance to the person themselves always stays the same. Whether you’re a design legend or an emerging talent, validation matters deeply.

For established professionals and design legends, winning a Red Dot confirms they’re still performing at the level they believe they are, that they remain in the mindset of the current generation. For young designers trying to establish themselves, awards serve as career kickstarters. Jova shares stories of students who took part in Red Dot, won something, and immediately got employed by major companies wanting their design talent. Beyond career advancement, recognition provides crucial feedback from professionals who aren’t involved in your project and may have never met you before. This validation boosts self-esteem and helps designers affirm they’re on the right path, especially when they’ve just created something great and need confirmation to continue in that direction.

Recognition as Responsibility: Creating a Better World

The overarching theme throughout the conversation is that recognition has evolved significantly in its purpose and meaning. As Jova reflects, he’s watched recognition transform from something designers hoped for to something they expect, from validation to influence, from celebration to obligation. Today, every designer has a platform, every product gets shared instantly, and everyone’s fighting for the same attention. The question isn’t whether awards still matter; it’s whether they’re measuring the right things.

When asked during the rapid fire round what recognition should ultimately create, Jova offers two words: a better world. The biggest misconception designers have about awards? That it’s all a scam. The most overrated aspect of design recognition today? Just designing something that is very popular but lacks usefulness. This episode of Design Mindset crystallizes something important: in an age when anyone can go viral and content floods every feed, expert validation becomes more critical than ever. Awards that maintain rigorous standards and evaluate based on timeless principles fulfill a vital function, steering the design community toward values that matter: quality, responsibility, innovation, and seduction. The future belongs to awards that actively create conditions for great design to flourish.

Design Mindset, Powered by KeyShot, premieres every week with new conversations exploring the minds shaping the future of design. Listen to the full episode with Jova Zec to hear more insights on recognition, Red Dot’s evolution, and what makes design truly timeless.

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The post Instagram vs Impact: How Design Awards Separate Digital Noise from Real Value first appeared on Yanko Design.