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

by Deepa Prahalad (Author), Ravi Sawhney (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 29 ratings
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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.

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  1. Print length
    206 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    FT Press
  5. Publication date
    July 19, 2010
  6. File size
    1841 KB
  7. Page Flip
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  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"By putting the empowerment of people at the center of strategy creation, "Predictable Magic" is as much a book about values and leadership as it is about design. It can help executives find meaning and value in their work as they create meaning and value for their consumers."-Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, world-renowned executive coach; author, "The New York Times" bestsellers, "MOJO" and "What Got You Here Won't Get You There" "While every company strives to create products and services that dazzle, few achieve this feat. Prahalad and 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"."-Dr. Gary Hamel, Visiting Professor, London Business School; author, "The Future of Management" and "Leading the Revolution" "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 to capture and define the emotional wants and needs of a user."-Ken Musgrave, IDSA, Director, Experience Design, Dell "Prahalad and Sawhney shine a light on an important piece of the strategic puzzle: how to convert consumer emotions into successful designs. They provide a rigorous approach to guide innovation efforts from strategy creation through execution. This is a must-read for anyone who is trying to create a new product or develop a new business model."-Dr. Vijay Govindarajan, Professor, Tuck School of Business; Chief Innovation Consultant, GE; author, "Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators" "Prahalad and Sawhney have written an unusually useful book. It is one of the rare sources that go beyond giving us another definition of innovation. With concrete examples linked to practical principles, they show us how to do it."-Patrick Whitney, Steelcase / Robert C. Pew Professor and Dean, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology

About the Author

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.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003S9WABC
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ FT Press; 1st edition (July 19, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 19, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1841 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 206 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Ravi Sawhney

    Ravi Sawhney

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    As the founder and CEO of RKS Design, Ravi Sawhney has spent more than thirty years at the forefront of product and technology innovation, and has grown his industrial design consultancy into a global leader in the fields of strategy, innovation and design. While leading RKS, Sawhney has helped generate more than 150 patents and over 90 design awards on behalf of his diverse list of international clients, and his work has been featured on the cover of Business Week's best product design issue. Sawhney invented the predictable Psycho-Aesthetics® design methodology, which Harvard Business Press adopted as a business school case study before it grew in popularity to become a central focus of Predictable Magic, a new book co-authored by Sawhney and published by Wharton School Publishing, released in August 2010 and available at major national retailers. Sawhney is also the regular columnist/ blogger of 'Design Reach' for Fast Company, as well as a popular corporate and academic lecturer who has spoken at many prominent business schools, trade conventions and international conferences. Sawhney is a fellow in the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) and holds a Ph.D (Hon.) from the Academy of Art University San Francisco.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Deepa Prahalad

    Deepa Prahalad

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Deepa Prahalad is an author, business strategist and consultant specializing in opportunities at the intersection of consumer experience, technology and strategy. 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. Prahalad has worked with firms from start-ups to large multinationals and has been RKS's global insights leader since 2008.

    Prahalad collaborated with RKS to research and co-author the upcoming book, Predictable Magic (Wharton School Publishing). She has spoken at business schools such as USC and Harvard on design strategy using the EMPOWER framework she developed and conducts workshops for executives. Most recently, she worked with Harvard Business School to develop a case exercise on the use of the RKS' Psycho-Aesthetics® design philosophy. Prahalad has a BA in Economics and Political Science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

    To read more from Deepa, please visit www.predictablemagic.com and visit the Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchS/?q=deepa+prahalad

    See more on the author's page
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
29 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

John Gibbs
4.0 out of 5 stars Insights into the design process
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2011
Verified Purchase
Consumers engage with products and services for emotional reasons and adopt based on rich and fulfilling experience, according to Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney in this book. That is why it is important to use emotion and experience as a starting point for strategy and design. This enables the designer to create the connection to a product or service that makes people want to spread the joy of their discovery.

The authors go on to describe a design approach called "Psycho-Aesthetics". This includes a two-dimensional mapping process in which the vertical axis shows the degree of need, from essential through to aspirational, while the horizontal axis shows the degree of interactivity from passive through to immersive. Existing products can be placed in their appropriate locations on the map, as can different groups of consumers, in order to identify gaps which might be suitable for the design of new products.

The book describes a number of products which have become successful as a result of innovative designs, many of which have been created by RKS Design, a firm founded by one of the authors. These include a refrigerator, a loudspeaker, a water bottle and a guitar. The stories behind these products show the great amount of research which goes into creating a product which not only looks good but provides a positive consumer experience in every aspect.

However, while the book provides convincing evidence that RKS Design is capable of designing great products, it does not in my opinion fully live up to the promise of telling the reader how to use the design strategy to create "predictable magic". Plenty of research and imagining of the consumer experience seem to be necessary but not sufficient ingredients. The additional magic tricks of aesthetic design and inspired marketing are not fully described, although it may be impossible to do so. Nevertheless, I found the book enjoyable to read.
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Shelley Takahashi
5.0 out of 5 stars Predictable Magic
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2010
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Design professionals as well as design students can learn from Predictable Magic.

I teach industrial design classes at the Art Institute in LA and I am the chair for the LA chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America. Teaching students how to design products that resonate with consumers emotionally and creating a compelling user experience is not easy. My design psychology students could not relate to the concepts from other books. Mid-quarter, I introduced the "Psycho-Aesthetic" mapping concept from Predictable Magic. The light bulbs turned on in their heads.

Predictable Magic is easy to comprehend and will be helpful when I give presentations as a professional. It is a great diagnostic tool as well as story telling tool. The platform will be understood by Executives, Buyers, Marketing, Sales, Finance and Design.

One of the authors, Ravi Sawhney, is a member of IDSA and recently gave an overview of the "Psycho-Aesthetic" process at our local design lecture series. I recommend that if you have a chance to attend one of his lectures, you do not pass up the opportunity.
5 people found this helpful
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Loren Woirhaye
4.0 out of 5 stars Very cool idea framework for start-ups, industrial designers, marketers and web developers
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2010
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
If you're like me, you distrust the 5-star reviews.

That's why I'm fickle about giving them. I always look at the less-than-stellar reviews first - after all, 5 stars means "loved it" and sometimes the reviewer just gushes without much discernment. I don't have unlimited time to read books, so I read the less-than-stellar reviews for a clues from grouchier readers like me who've read a lot on the topic and are looking for fresh insights and thinking. Honestly, there's a lot of repetitive stuff out there in the lit. on marketing and sales. You grow weary of it after awhile.

This book does contain original thinking. It's not presented in a stunning way, unfortunately. The images are in greyscale which gives the impression, on thumbing the book, that it's full of grey ideas too. It's not, and I hope the presentation doesn't prevent this book from getting the audience it should get, because at it's center is some very provocative thinking.
It's a killer piece of thought-leadership collateral for the authors in any case.

The focus is on industrial design issues from a strategic point-of-view: finding an under-served segment in the marketplace, figuring out what features a category-dominating product for that niche would have, and then inventing the aesthetics that will make it appealing.

I'm primarily a marketer, not a product designer yet I found my brain humming with ideas while reading this book. This is not a "how to" book about marketing, but if you think about marketing at the strategic level, you'll probably find the way this book identifies opportunities in the marketplace really cool. I did.

In today's crowded, choice-rich marketplace, people are confused and they do in fact give nice design an edge in their buying decisions in a lot of cases. The cooler-looking product wins. Not always, there has to be an opportunity and there has to be the right money to promote the launch. This book shows you how to identify the opportunity and, to some extent, prioritize the buying criteria in the market segment you're going after.

All the examples were hard-goods: stuff made in molds from plastic and mostly with electrical parts in them. The authors have impressive insight into how to make a hot design, but that's not readily transfered by this book. I'm a furniture-maker when I make the time - so I know some stuff about design - Sam Maloof said: "I don't know if good design can be taught, but I think it can be learned". So this book won't teach you design or even aesthetics - and that's not the point.

It would interest me a lot to read how these principles described here can be applied to website design and software. All the examples were of actual products you interact with using your hands, which is what the writers design. I can see the model being very valuable to smart web developers and start-up web companies though.

The doctrine preached here is that design and marketing should be integrated and talking to each other from the inception point of the project. Too often marketing people are brought in way too late, after the design is done. "We've got this doo-dad and we want YOU to figure out how to sell it," Ah. The folly.

Designers and marketing people should be involved and on the same page from the beginning. Most products fail in the marketplace - 90% or more - and it's often because the product shouldn't have been manufactured in the first place. Design cannot over-come all problems, and neither can skilled marketing. There has to be a need. This book shows you how to find that need (want, actually, because we don't need most stuff) in the marketplace, the sweet-spot segment that's going to be receptive to a product design that combines aesthetic appeal with functionality in a specific way that fits the demographic you're going after. Fail at that, and your product will probably fail.

Most of the war of business is finding battles you can win. This book shows us some very cool skills to do that.
2 people found this helpful
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E. T. Hightower
5.0 out of 5 stars Practical Tools / Great Examples
Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2011
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Predictable Magic offers a very practical approach to driving innovation within your new product strategy, design and development process. The tools and frameworks can help teams achieve product "newness" and commercial relevance.
One person found this helpful
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