- Calm, Ambient Computing
- Technology for the Life-Excited
- Community Insider Across Consumer Tech
- Photography-Led Product Craft
Designer · Poppy · Pratt Institute
Anunay Chauhan
Brooklyn, New York
Five years on one idea: technology that stays out of the way, now shipped as Poppy.
Anunay Chauhan designs Poppy at Second Nature Computing, a proactive AI assistant that turns your calendar, health, and location into briefings and reached open beta in May 2026. He came up through consumer-tech communities — five years as a OnePlus ambassador, credited on the OnePlus 12 box, then a founding community member at Nothing and a consultant at Humane. He designs for what he calls the life-excited: people, like his mother, whose days are too full to manage their tools.
- OnePlus 12Credited by name on the box (2024)
- $120K+Raised via a zero-waste NGO's website
- 8 yrsOnePlus Community member
- 188Design & tech events attended on Luma
Four beliefs behind five years of designing technology that stays out of the way.
A dozen years of design, from a fan forum to the App Store — pull one out.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 10 WORKS
One idea, five years — technology that stays out of the way, carried from a fan forum to the App Store.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
Building Poppy, a phone that stays out of the way
After a summer running design sprints at Antler's NYC residency, Anunay co-founded Second Nature Computing to build Poppy — a proactive AI assistant that weaves calendar, health, and location into briefings, with no chat. It reached open beta on the App Store on May 11, 2026, and he wrote the design-philosophy essay that named its audience: the life-excited.
“The magic isn't in the features. It's in the moments you stop noticing your phone.”
Turning pro — internships, consultancy, and campus work
While finishing his BFA, Anunay moved from community work into paid design: a brand-design internship at the AI startup Cognida.ai, enterprise UX at the global consultancy BORN Group, and a campus rebrand at Pratt's career center. In 2024 the OnePlus 12 box shipped with his name on it for the Hasselblad camera collaboration.
Pratt, Sidekick, and founding-team community work
At Pratt Institute — a BFA in Communications Design with a UX/UI and Entrepreneurship double minor — Anunay turned his love of gadgets into a critique of them. His thesis, Sidekick, made calm computing literal. In parallel he was handpicked as a founding community member at Nothing and became a Community Consultant at Humane.
“At Pratt, I made it literal. I built Sidekick… The project was about restraint as a design principle — what happens when you remove the demand entirely?”
From fan to fam — OnePlus, photography, and Hyderabad
Born in New York and raised in Hyderabad, Anunay joined Twitter as a pre-teen and walked into his first tech event, a OnePlus pop-up, at 14. Fandom became insider craft: years inside the OnePlus community, photography, OxygenOS feature requests, and — for a zero-waste NGO — a fundraising website that raised over $120,000.
“I'm very shy when it comes to creating threads on the forums, but you might have seen me hanging around in the replies or on Twitter.”