Ravi Sawhney is the highly respected founder and CEO of the Industrial Design consulting firm RKS. Ravi is an icon in the ID community through his lecturing (both in design and business), teaching, and involvement with the IDSA.
Before establishing RKS, Ravi worked on the very first graphical user touch screen interface with Xerox. Through his experience and methodology, Ravi developed the trademarked design process Psycho-Aesthetics®.
Recently, Mr. Sawhney has co-authored the book Predictable Magic. The main focus of Predictable Magic is the theory behind, implementation of, and successful case studies of Psycho-Aesthetics®. Psycho-Aesthetics® is centered around the emotional connection design has to end users and the fact that a successful product should, above all, make the user feel good about him or herself. It is an excellent resource for any designer and business person by displaying a proven product development process.
Ravi's process has become a case study for the Harvard Business School and, he holds an Honorary PHD from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Mr. Sawhney about himself, RKS, and his new book.
Predictable Magic by Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney
?: How did you discover and get started with Industrial Design and how did it lead to the creation of your consulting firm RKS?
Ravi: I found out about industrial design by mistakenly enrolling in Engineering my freshman year. I ran into the Dean of Engineering and explained to him what I was looking to do and he explained that is not engineering, that is Industrial Design. Which he pointed out is part of the art department not the Engineering department. I said great, thats cool, Engineering at the time was 90 percent guys, and art was 70 percent girls, so I said ok I'm happy to go in that direction.
When I was in school I started working very early. By the time I was in my third year of school, I was working in Industrial design while going to college. So i just kinda jumped in and was happy to sweep floors and build models. I was a good model maker so I worked all the way through college.
After college, I went to work for Xerox. I was there for a few years and then started freelancing. The freelancing turned into a client or two coming my way and next thing I knew, I was very very busy and running my own company. It was just based on a viral aspect of going with the clients.
KOR Vida Hydration Vessel (designed by RKS)
KOR Vida Hydration Vessel (designed by RKS)
?: A major subject of your book, Predictable Magic, is your trademarked design process Psycho-Aesthetics®. Could you briefly describe Psycho-Aesthetics and the origins of it?
Ravi: Psycho-Aesthetics® started with my work at Xerox with the first graphical user touch screen. At that time I was thrown in with working with psychologists and looking into the psychology of design and how it affects human behavior.
That led me to coin the term Psycho-Aesthetics® in the mid 80s. At that time it was a way to use a term to really focus on the psyche and psychology's affect of design. It has evolved since then and continues to evolve. In the 90s it turned into picking up Maslow's Hierarchy and we started interpreting that into mapping systems of interactivity in the hierarchy.
In the very late 90s, we picked up Joseph Campbell's work and interpreted that into the consumer's heroic journey. The heroic journey for consumers leads them to the point of not just feeling heroic, but being evangelistic about what they are doing.
Psycho-Aesthetics® has become a suite of tools through the years. So many design thinking tools that were available were very heavy into personification, primary and secondary research, and ethnography. We do key attracters mapping and persona mapping and analysis to pick the right personas. We also do bench marking. We use a wide variety of tools that we have all in the hopper.
The way we look at it is design our tool, but what we do is create smiles; resonating affects on consumers; and ways to attract, engage, adopt and reward consumers. So, that is the comprehensive understanding of Psycho-Aesthetics®. It's really a repeatable methodology that generates a pathway to create success through using design as that voice and that point of connection.
KOR Delta Hydration Vessel (designed by RKS)
?: In your book you state that within businesses, a disconnect between designers and business people is communication and the lack of relating to one another. Do you think this issue is getting better with business people and designers beginning to understanding each other more?
Ravi: We are in a different place because we train ourselves and train our clients in Psycho-Aesthetics. So that becomes our common language.
But otherwise, design and business, for the most part, do not have a common language. So business objectives are hard to articulate. Also, critical insights that are important to designers and to the target audience are not always articulated in the right way to business so that they understand the importance in the values and the subtleties.
You have to form that common language. That is done, like in other professions, through education and through performance. For somebody to listen to us, designers must have a track record of performance. And when they do, and when we can hold our head up high in front of a client and speak with confidence and authority and credibility, you can educate the client in a very positive way. They can also educate you and through the cross education, a common language is formed.
It is getting much better and design is much more highly respected than ever before. It gets better day by day.
Neuma Hybrid SS Tattoo Machine (designed by RKS)
?: In your book and during your lectures, you mention that you were involved with the creation of the first touch screen interface while you were working for Xerox. Could you briefly describe this experience?
Ravi: First off, before I was with Xerox, I wasn't computer literate and I actually don't think anybody really was. That was in the late 70s. I was working part of the Industrial Design group. In our west coast section, I was kinda the young guy in the department by 20 years. There may have been other people the same age, but as far as our group, I was the youngest by 20 years.
I started doing traditional industrial design: building foam core renderings, human factors studies, coloring studies, etc. All that very hardcore traditional Industrial Design stuff that you would see at Xerox. Someone had to go over and work with all these psychologists and nobody else wanted to do it. So they picked the young guy and said, hey kid you go over to this other building and work with these guys. It was two dozen PHD psychologists and they were working with at least 100 programmers to develop this new interface.
Nobody ever thought it would really go anywhere. It was just another Xerox experiment as far as we knew. Once I got over there and worked with the psychologists, I was sitting in observation rooms watching how people behaved and interacted and how they wouldn't touch the screen. Nobody would touch the screen. Even though it said "touch here to start". No one wanted to touch that because you never touched a TV because of finger prints, and you were supposed to stay five feet away from a TV screen. It was a completely foreign concept of doing this. They had no other alternative because they had all this advanced technology and capability, but they couldn't build a control panel large enough to do everything that needed to be done. This was the only way to walk people through screens and give them the choices they needed.
You know what I learned? I learned to watch, experiment, and think like a backyard psychologist but also just to be a good observer though the trial and error process. We simulate that for our people today. We watch how people react: whether they are confused, engaged, or exploratory. How does their body language change? You just have to learn to be a great critical watcher of people to the point where you have to not only speak to them, but speak for them.
Hamilton Medical T1 ICU Ventilator (designed by RKS)
?: How do you think the role of Industrial Designers will evolve in the future and do you think Designers will become more involved in other aspects of business?
Ravi: For those who are ready, they will be asked and welcomed to the table. They will be asked to help create insight, innovation, and drive. They will also provide leadership to build brands, consumer experience, and relevance of innovation. All through their design thinking and design eyes, their experience, and their ability to forecast the future and to speak to and for the target audiences to identify future needs and aspirations of people.
it also depends on how people centric they are. The more people centric they are, and the more mastery they have of the Industrial design process, the more they have the ability to go upstream. Design has continually been going upstream. It's just a mater of being prepared to go upstream to answer those questions and to do it in a way that also understands that as you move upstream, there is higher level of risk and gain for the company.
You can't be superficial in your process. There are higher levels of due diligence, research, and studying synthesis that has to occur before you actually get to the point where you can start designing. You can't just start designing on the fly. You have to really do your homework and have to get inside the heads of the market. You have be able to project where the market is going to be in two years, three years, five years, and ten years out and how the brand that you are working on, and the company you are working for, is going to be in advance of the competition. How are they going to anticipate consumer needs?
First, you start off for being known for what you do. Then you get to the point where you've done it enough that you are known for what you do and know. After you've accumulated enough experience of doing the work and enough knowledge and wisdom from the experience, you can get to the place where you are engaged for what you think. You have to start with the micro to get with the macro.
Pick up a copy of Predictable Magic and watch out for one of Mr. Sawhney's lectures.
