WANDER INTO SOMETHING NEW

On Bhushan’s desk at home, paper toys lie drying. Next to them is a sketchbook with sketches of automobiles, not furniture. This feels intentional.

Bhushan designs furniture for a living. At Interio, his days are spent thinking about Indian homes, consumer needs, proportions, materials. But when he gets home, none of that follows him to the table. Design does. Furniture doesn’t.

Designers rarely keep work where it belongs. Ideas don’t arrive only at desks, often they arrive while doing something else. Bhushan doesn’t fight this.

Beyond work, Bhushan is a husband and father. “My son is 8 now,” he says. “Like most parents, we didn’t want him stuck to a screen.” Play became the common ground where they spent time together, making and creating fun projects. There were phases. Lego was one of them—enjoyable but expensive. They began looking for something simpler and slower. That’s how paper toys entered the house.

Paper toys didn’t stay shallow for long. Like most designers, once Bhushan enters something, he goes deeper. From cutting and folding, he moved into creating characters and from characters, into learning new software. 
“I wanted to make better ones,” he says. 
“More interesting characters. Maybe even a series. A world around them.”

No deadline or outcomes, but pure attention.

He sketches every day. At home, it’s automobiles, not furniture. Cars give him distance from briefs, decisions and ideas that need defending. They return him to the reason he entered design in the first place— Imagination.

Earlier, work followed him more closely. He carried projects back and entered competitions, stayed near screens. With time, that changed. He learned the value of distance. Of being off-screen and letting the mind wander without asking it to be useful.

“This kind of play is important,” he says. “It nurtures the creative side that work needs.”

Of course, being a designer, he laughs and says that he can turn almost anything into work. Still, there is a rhythm. Everything always begins on paper with a sketch first. The screen comes later to refine, to detail, to finish.

For most people—especially those who love what they do—the line between work and play is never clean. In Bhushan’s home, it isn’t something to fix. It’s understood.

So be it.