Ravi Sawhney and his team have designed water bottles for KOR Water, household appliances for LG, medical devices, a tattoo inking machine, and a guitar. The 56-year-old founder and CEO of RKS, a Thousand Oaks-based product design firm, said the products have one thing in common: a design that strikes a personal chord with consumers. “We talk in terms of story and experience,” Sawhney said. RKS, founded in 1980, has received more than 100 design industry awards, including a first prize in the 2011 International Design Awards for the KOR Aura water bottle. The firm employs about 30 people at its Conejo Valley offices, where it moved in 1998 from Canoga Park. Sawhney said he and his team interview consumers and incorporate research into human motivation and self-discovery when designing products for clients. Born in Canada, Sawhney moved to Southern California at a young age. He graduated from California State University, Northridge, and then went to work for Xerox on an early version of touchscreen technology. From 2000 to 2008, Sawhney also headed up RKS Guitars, an offshoot company that made guitars from sustainable materials. He sponsors the Ravi K. and Amalia Sawhney Creative Excellence Award for a graduating senior at the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication at CSUN. Question: What is your philosophy about product design? Answer: We have an underlying or overarching philosophy that is encapsulated in a quote that we use, ‘It’s not how you feel about the design or the experience, it’s how it makes you feel about yourself.’ That’s the underpinning in everything we do. Design is our tool. What we do is increase quality of life for people. We increase levels of self-actualization and we provide value — meaning, a connection. Q: Did you start the company to pursue that philosophy? A: I started my company in 1980. At that time I left Xerox after being part of the team working on Xerox PARC (a touchscreen interface). Working with 30 psychologists, I was infused with a level of insight, understanding and challenge that went beyond design. I was infused with this type of thinking at a young age. Q: How did you come to work at Xerox? A: I was the junior designer at Xerox, hired right out of college. I got tapped on the shoulder to go work with 200 programmers and 30 psychologists to develop the first touchscreen interface. Since it was in hardcore industrial design, no one else wanted to do it. Q: How was that experience? A: It was life changing. You saw how they thought and what they did to develop the first touch screen. It was not what I expected. It was extensive amounts of user testing, trial and error, a back and forth of weekly series of testing. Out of that what was ingrained in me was this understanding about how people feel about a design or experience that is very personal. That is how I wrote that underpinning in 1985. Q: Did you want to start a design company? A: I never thought of owning my own firm. In fact, it was probably the last thing I thought about. There wasn’t much work out there. No one was hiring. People asked me to do a few projects here and there. Next thing you know, I have more projects than I can handle myself. Q: How did you find employees who shared your beliefs on design? A: I taught at Cal State Northridge and Art Center (College of Design in Pasadena). Out of Cal State Northridge came our creative director who was my top student. Through the process of teaching, I created an environment where we very much learned from each other on a constant and ongoing basis. Q: Do you still maintain that learning environment here? A: Absolutely. We still lecture. Just two days ago we had 60 executives from Korea come in for a two hour lecture. The week before, we had 40 executives from India. That same week I spoke at a design management conference in Portland. It’s more ongoing lecturing, especially at Pepperdine (University), UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), and USC (University of Southern California). We teach and we teach each other. Every Monday morning when we do our staff meeting everyone will make a presentation so everyone learns from it. Q: What kinds of challenges did you face as you grew the firm? A: The usual — the feast and famine phenomena that occurs when you’re small — where you’ll get the work, you do the work, you finish the work and now you’re out of work. That was the challenge in the early days — that and the long hours. We still work hard. We still have a strong work ethic that comes through. We attract staff members that have that work ethic. Q: You’ve worked with some local companies to design their products, including the MiniMed division of Medtronic in Chatsworth. Tell me about that. A: We redesigned the MiniMed infusion pump from something that patients were hesitant to use. At that time we took a medical device and transformed it into something looking like a pager. There is a stigma attached to wearing a medical device and having to take it out in public. Who wants to take out a device and have people look at you? People felt self-conscious, and for that reason (they) were not adopting the technology as fast as they could have. By transforming it into this pager-esque device, adoption rates went up. Q: Was Mini Med open to your redesign of the insulin pump? A: Yes and no. They were led through a series of design and experience proposals and came to a collaborative agreement on the design. When we proposed the new generation of using color and translucence, the wheels came off the wagon a bit. As one would expect, the internal team struggled with the concept of leveraging a Swatch approach to something as important as a diabetic pump. Together with the internal design lead, Paul Chenney, we ultimately convinced everyone to give it a try and put the translucent blue into the market. It turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. Q: How do you get clients? A: Two ways. One is return clients; we have a high return rate. The other is people learn about us through awards or through articles or speaking engagements and they reach out to us and connect with us. Q: Why do you think clients choose to do business with RKS? A: They like our results. If you are going to be consistent, you have to have a framework. Our framework is discovery, creation and execution. We go out into the world and we do primary research, we do secondary research, we experiment with people showing different stimuli and different levels of design to pull out of them what could be and should be the future. Q: How does the design for the KOR water bottles fit in with the RKS design philosophy? A: The RKS philosophy emphasizes the importance of the self, the sense of well-being, the emotion of having others see you as making the world as better place. It serves as a reminder that the owner chooses to save the planet a bit and make themselves a healthier person in the process. KOR’s mantra is: ‘Better Me, Better World,’ which fits perfectly. Q: Does the Southern California environment play into your design philosophy? A: It absolutely does. My statement, ‘It’s not how you feel about the design or the experience, it’s how it makes you feel about yourself’ is really a people push as opposed to a technology push. That comes from growing up in this type of environment, where you are surrounded by the media, surrounded by the movie industry, surrounded by technology. It gets into your DNA. Q: How big of an influence has Apple been on product design? A: Apple has done a great job of showing how design can be a key component in the building value of a brand. Their designers are bright, passionate, committed perfectionists. They detail every product like it’s a watch. In return, the brand loyalty is phenomenal. Q: What’s the story about your guitar company? A: It was about a decade ago. I was learning guitar and complaining about guitar stands. I said, ‘Let’s design a better guitar stand.’ Paul Janowski, our operations manager, said ‘Let’s design a better guitar.’ We brought in Dave Mason from the band Traffic and he said, ‘I’ll work with you to bring it up to a level of a high-performance guitar.’ We worked with Dave for several years to perfect it and then we launched. We sold 2,000 guitars and then I had to make a decision. At that point, I said, ‘Building guitars is fun but my real calling is research strategy and design.’ We do make accessories, guitar hangars and guitar stands that are sold through the Fender brand. Q: What made RKS Guitars different? A: The first ones used sustainable materials. The body is made out of a cellulose material. Everything is farm-raised on the guitar. It weighs less, it has great tonal range and it has the controls moved closer so you can get to them easier. It is tough to do a guitar. Obviously, we got it right because everybody from the Rolling Stones on down picked it up. Q: Do you still play guitar? A: I still play, but I have lost a lot of my playing ability. I’m getting my calluses back now playing 5-10 minutes a day. I’ve been practicing on my 12 string which will build your calluses faster because it is harder on your fingers. Q: You co-wrote a book two years ago. What is the origin of the title, “Predictable Magic?” A: ‘Predictable Magic’ is a term that came about after we had yet another spectacular result generation collaborative session with one of our client teams. My close friend an executive vice president at the time — still my very close friend — responded to my comment that we create magic every time we have these creative emersion sessions. He commented how we do it predictably and that what we did was create ‘predictable magic.’
Feel Good Designs
