Introduction

“Information’s pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.”
—Clarence Day

This book is the result of a collaboration that grew out of a chance meeting. Although as individuals we have followed different professional paths, we quickly found common ground in two fervently shared beliefs: in the power of innovation and in the importance of the individual. The road to those convictions was different for each of us, but debating how these ideals may shape both design and strategy has been a source of tremendous learning and growth.

It’s the Individual That Matters

For almost 30 years, one of us, Ravi, has been leading RKS Design, the firm he founded. As an industrial designer and entrepreneur, Ravi has been involved in the innovation process in many industries from concept to execution. As the scope and volume of projects grew, so too did the need to efficiently and reliably understand the needs of the clients, market, and end users. To make sense of design success and failure, Ravi drew on experience in the heydays at Xerox during the 1970s working on some of the first versions of the modern touch screen to understand how human behavior relates to design and design to experience. Reflecting on hours of consumer testing, he realized that most of the lackluster performers (in technology and elsewhere) did not have functional flaws—they simply failed to engage consumers. Some products made people feel inferior, as if they didn’t understand great design. Others intimidated the audience, such as the early versions of the touch screen.

Puzzling over how to prevent this scenario led to a long process of exploration and the development of Psycho-Aesthetics^®, the RKS philosophy of emotionally connecting with consumers through design. The focus of this approach is squarely on the individuals, specifically their emotions, aspirations, and connections as the starting point for strategy and design. Tracking the individual experience and emotional response is the goal of the process, rather than creating new functions and features alone. The test of success lies in whether the design empowers individuals and creates a meaningful experience.

For one of us, Deepa, business strategy and innovation are more than a matter of business school and professional experience; they are somewhat of an inheritance. Her father, C.K. Prahalad, was a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, and she had the benefit of watching, and often participating, in robust debates at the dinner table with MBA students, CEOs, and academics. Many of these sketches and diagrams created during these gatherings eventually entered the market and became hugely successful products and services. The idea that business should have a tangible impact on improving the lives of individuals—providing both opportunity and value—was cemented early on. Here, too, the role of aspirations—of managers, consumers, and corporations—was seen as the driving force in successful strategy and innovation.

These lessons resonated, though Deepa chose to study political science and economics. The Berlin Wall fell and Tiananmen Square unfolded while she was in high school, and the Soviet Union imploded a few days before a final exam in Cold War politics during her sophomore year in college. During her first “real” job (based in Singapore), her company and most others were working on strategies to enter the newly liberalizing markets of India and China. Many offerings that had been successful in the West were promptly rejected, even when prices were competitive. Although people were hungry for change, they also wanted to retain a connection to their own cultures and beliefs. Here, too, the voices of individuals and their emotions made themselves known, loud and clear.

The Model

Businesses today must respond to rising consumer aspirations. We wrote this book in the hope that understanding how to make these the starting point for strategy can help both the business and design communities transform their good intentions and need for self-sustenance into the enduring businesses that create opportunity for themselves and others. Executives, too, are empowered when their work has a positive impact on the world around them. We hope that this cycle can serve to counter the cynicism that abounds and help steer the path to solutions.

This book narrates some of the cases from the evolving practice of Psycho-Aesthetics. We firmly believe that innovation is as possible for a two-person start-up as for a large diversified corporation. We chose cases that represent a range of industries and challenges. They are largely based on our own experience. However, that choice is not meant to negate the truly outstanding achievements of other design firms and many innovative companies. The cases included herein were chosen merely because these were the ones that we could narrate with authenticity and a level of detail that may help you and your teams as they undertake similar challenges.

Highlighting the role of emotional insight should not take away from the importance of data and research. We simply believe that the legitimate need for structure and process should also explicitly capture the emotion and experience of the consumer. These are the ultimate measures of market success and need to be considered along with financial analyses. Better yet, the tools are accessible to those who are in charge of actually implementing design and innovation— the designers and executives themselves. In acknowledgment of the time and resource constraints in most firms, the process is clear, efficient, and replicable.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rottman School and a vocal advocate of design, once commented, “Strategists don’t have to learn how to understand designers better. In the future, they will have to become designers.”¹ We show how the energy directed into creating quantitative metrics of emotions and cognitive experience can be understood in the early stages, reducing risks of error and creating sustainable company business models in the process. Today, Psycho-Aesthetics goes way beyond product design, enabling businesses to look beyond the horizon. That’s another reason the book is called Predictable Magic—not only does Psycho-Aesthetics empower businesses to create magic predictably, but it also enables us to predict what designs and brand strategies will be successful in the future.

A Simpler Way to Innovate and Design

In this book, we share the Psycho-Aesthetics philosophy and methodology through case studies from various industries. We start with helping to answer some of the basic questions about design: How should you approach the design process? How do you know when you’ve arrived at the right solution? And how can you make sure that your design and business strategies work together—consistently? We then show you how to translate these insights into actual products and services. You can

• Learn how to map existing products, consumers, and channels using the Psycho-Aesthetics methodology to reveal new opportunities for innovation

• Understand how to identify design features that can enable you to emotionally connect with your consumers

• Mitigate risk by understanding your consumers and setting appropriate design priorities

• Learn, with fresh cases, how companies from Fortune 500 to start-ups have used design to create sustained organic growth

• Align all stakeholders around the design process

It is now widely understood that consumers engage for emotional reasons and adopt based on rich and fulfilling experience. Yet few companies look at emotion and experience explicitly as a starting point for strategy and design. We have found that those willing to do so often see higher profits, brand value, and levels of consumer satisfaction.

About This Book

This book is organized in two parts. Part I, “Creation of a Design Strategy,” focuses on aligning creative and executive teams and creating an actionable manifest that is the basis of successful design. Teams are guided to answer three major questions in creating a design strategy and use Psycho-Aesthetics mapping techniques and tools to guide the collaboration.

Part II, “Implementation and Consumer Experience,” covers the topics of implementation and consumer experience. Here, the process of translating insights and strategy into physical design are discussed along with some litmus tests for design success. We discuss how to position these designs in real-life retail and Web settings so that the value of the offering is easily understood and communicated to the consumer.

We ask and answer some familiar strategic questions about markets, consumers and opportunities, but we answer them from the perspective of the consumer—not the firm. Understanding that all insight would not be “provable analysis,” we sought to make the decision-making logic transparent by mapping consumer interactions in a collaborative setting. This represents the culmination of lessons learned from across industries, which have shown us time and time again that there are basic emotional responses that apply to all consumer behaviors, and these responses can be analyzed objectively. We have broken down the steps into a framework we call “EMPOWER.” Empowerment is after all, what the best companies must do for their teams inside, and what they must do for their consumers as well.

We invite you to continue the conversation with us at www.predictablemagic.com.