About the Authors
Deepa is a business strategist specializing in opportunities at the intersection of consumer experience, technology, and strategy. She has experience in a wide range of industries and has worked with firms from start-ups to large multinationals.
Ravi is the founder and CEO of RKS. He has been recognized with nearly every major industrial design award and is named on over 150 patents. He invented the Psycho-Aesthetics® design strategy presented in this book.
Predictable Magic
Predictable Magic is the long-awaited publication of the inspiration RKS founder Ravi Sawhney had in the seventies while working on the first touch screen interface at Xerox (PARC). Over thirty years later, and after exhaustive study and implementation, that inspiration has emerged as an insightful business text co-authored with long-time colleague Deepa Prahalad and published by Wharton Business Press. Now available for pre-order in advance of the anticipated August 2010 release, Predictable Magic explains in a step-by-step process how business success is created and fostered through design as a strategic tool that powerfully connects consumer's needs and aspirations with rich and memorable experiences. Psycho-Aesthetics, the heart-beat of RKS' replicable innovation process, is brought to life for readers through the EMPOWER framework, incorporating the contributions of Abraham Maslow and Joseph Campbell, as well as illustrative success stories depicting breakthrough innovations for diverse clientele in many highly-competitive industries. The end result is a remarkably simple and strait-forward technique business and design executives can leverage again-and-again in their pursuit of consumer-centered innovation. In doing so, Predictable Magic holds revolutionary potential to help leaders from all industries foster a needed new design mentality within their boardrooms and organizations as a way of better reaching that elusive goal – Predictable Magic.
Learn more at PredictableMagic.com, or pre-order from these fine retailers:
What People are Saying
"Truly great designs are magical—they surprise us with their unexpected functionality, delight us with their thoughtful ergonomics and beguile us with their seductive aesthetics. While every company strives to create products and services that dazzle, few achieve this feat. Now, in Predictable Magic, Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney lay out a simple but powerful methodology for turning deep consumer insights into attention-grabbing, expectation-defying designs. If you’re looking to increase the "magic quotient" in the things your company makes and sells, you'll want to dig into Predictable Magic."
"The natural fusion of psychology and creative disciplines enable a potent capability that will be critically important as we seek to better understand the demands of a diverse global population. "Predictable Magic" outlines an important framework for all product development professionals to capture and define the emotional wants and needs of a user. Conventional data capture and analysis often lack the ability gain true insight into the human user. This book provides principles and approaches address those limitations."
"Prahalad and Sawhney have developed the most comprehensive book I have found on the emerging study of emotional connections between consumers and products. The Psycho-Aesthetics concept is something that every person who has a leadership role in brand building, product development or innovation must absorb and understand. Predictable magic is attainable and needs to be integrated into the business architecture of every business."