For as long as he can remember, award-winning design visionary Dr. Ravi K. Sawhney has looked at the world around him and seen opportunities for positive change everywhere. It is a persistence of vision that has countless times resulted in the building of a better beast—the total remaking of an object to reveal its best possible nature and unleash its full potential, be it a luxury item or an essential tool of daily life. Glancing back, Ravi’s first personal involvement with inventing designs was via ceramics—as a teenager, he was throwing two to three original pieces a day. In this intensive practice, and the wisdom gained through making a successful piece—when form, shape, weight, function and purpose seamlessly blend—lay the seeds of Psycho-AestheticsSM, Sawhney’s proprietary, cutting-edge design methodology. Looking ahead, this unique means of creative expression— fusing art & design, science and experience—is a growing force in the rapidly accelerating trajectory of futuristic 21st century design.

 

“It’s a sum-of-all-its parts concept, a spirit of design that when fully and expertly realized, captivates, engages and delights its audience,” says Ravi, who is President & CEO of RKS Design, as well as an entrepreneur, educator and philanthropist. “Psycho-Aesthetics,” he adds, “lives in that rarified space of creating meaningful impressions of a design’s intended benefit, and the assured delivery of that benefit.” From mass spectrometers to cheese graters, from cellular phones to downhill sleds, and on through a full spectrum of items in between, the Psycho-Aesthetics process has resulted in the realization of forward-thinking, spirited versions of myriad objects that make up the concrete reality of our existence. As a relentless activist of vision, Sawhney’s core instinct to expect more--to enhance the everyday with the extraordinary--is a mindset that’s elevated him and RKS Design to positions of global prominence.

 

Merging the talents of over 40 people, including a team of two dozen product and industrial designers, the company Ravi founded in 1980 out of a spare room in his parents house now serves clients ranging from Fortune 500 icons to fledgling start-ups. Headquartered in a light-filled 18,000 square-foot building in Thousand Oaks, CA, RKS Design offers turnkey project oversight from research & development through production. Among its many world class features, RKS’ famed in-house prototyping lab, “Voodoo Works,” allows for unsurpassed capabilities to machine 3D models for “creative envisioning” and an experiential level to the process that Sawhney believes is key to a design’s ultimate success.

 

The house that Ravi built also incubates outside companies and invents a diverse array of licensed products—in all, Sawhney is named on over 160 patents. Notably, in 2001--with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dave Mason--he launched RKS Guitars, whose unique open-architecture instruments represent the most revolutionary rethinking of the electric guitar since Leo Fender first gave it life in the ’50s. Coming soon are RKS’ groundbreaking “Optigami Readers,” full-sized reading glasses plus a sturdy case in one almost impossibly compact, foldable piece.

 

 

As the Indian economy advances at an unprecedented pace, its population will crave experiences and artifacts that resonate with them, celebrate their accomplishments, and provide those very needed moments of self-actualization and sense of empowerment. This will create a need for the design community to refocus on the audience and always remember that "it's not how they feel about the design...it's how the design makes them feel about themselves."

 

Designers who stay true to this message by creating design experiences that parallel the Hero's Journey will ultimately be the ones that cause disruptive market penetration and product adoption.

 

If, through our designs, we can create powerfully memorable experiences by which the consumer is the Hero and the design is their "trophy," we will ultimately serve them very well.