Predictable Magic : Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business

Companies invest fortunes on innovation and product strategy. But, by some estimates, 80% of new products fail or dramatically underperform every year, though a few rare products succeed brilliantly. Why is this the case? Their creators have seamlessly integrated corporate strategy with design. They don’t deliver utilitarian objects: they craft rewarding, empowering experiences. To outsiders, this looks like magic: incomprehensible, and impossible to reproduce. But it isn’t. Predictable Magic presents a complete design process for making the “magic” happen -- over and over again. Veteran industrial designer Ravi Sawhney and business strategist Deepa Prahalad introduce Psycho-Aesthetics, a breakthrough approach for systematically creating deep emotional connections between consumers and brands. Step by step, the authors cover everything from research to strategy, implementation to consumer experience. They also demonstrate Psycho-Aesthetics at work – in case studies from some of the world’s top companies, including Sprint, Medtronic, Amana, and Hyundai. You’ll see how these great companies have used Psycho-Aesthetics to go beyond the utilitarian (or even the merely “beautiful”), to build products that powerfully connect with people… touch them… move them... time and again.

Deepa Prahalad 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 as a management consultant with firms from start-ups to large multinationals. Passionate about emerging markets and innovation, she began her career researching how to improve efficiency in UN procurement and later moved to Singapore to become a commodities trader with Cargill. She holds a BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Ravi Sawhney is founder and CEO of RKS, a global leader in strategy, innovation, and design. Sawhney’s contributions to the industrial design profession are legendary. At Xerox, he was sole Industrial Designer working with a team of 20 cognitive and social scientists to develop the world’s first touch-screen interface. Sawhney has been recognized with nearly every major industrial design award and has helped RKS’ elite clients generate more than 150 patents. He invented the popular Psycho-Aesthetics® design strategy presented in this book, an approach that has been profiled as a Harvard Business School case study.