Ravi Sawhney, FIDSA

Founder & CEO, RKS Design Born in Canada and raised in Southern California, Sawhney’s contributions to the industrial design profession range from numerous to legendary. After graduating college, he was hired by Xerox’s Advanced Development Group where he was the sole industrial designer working with a team of 20 cognitive and social scientists to develop the first touch-screen interface years before computers entered the mainstream. There he created an information hierarchy (including consistent placement of status bar, return icons and help menus) that is still seen in our computers today. Since founding RKS nearly 30 years ago, Sawhney has received every major design award in the industry, sometimes tenfold, for a top-tier client list. In the process, RKS has helped generate more than 150 patents on behalf of their clients. In 2004, he was named chair of the Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) program. Becoming aware of the need for design to break into the boardroom, Sawhney created the IDSA/BusinessWeek Catalyst award for products that generate measurable business results. In 2008, he was named executive director of Catalyst to direct its evolution into a program that develops case studies illustrating design’s power to effect positive change. Most recently, Sawhney has become an expert design blogger sharing his insights on Harvard Business Review, FastCompany.com, and in September 2009, he was inducted into IDSA’s Academy of Fellows. Sawhney invented the popular Psycho-Aesthetics® design strategy, which Harvard adopted as a Business School Case Study and is the subject of Predictable Magic, a book co-written with Deepa Prahalad and published by Wharton School Publishing. For this unique process that can quantify sources of emotional demand in the market, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He is a regularly featured lecturer at Harvard’s Business School, USC’s Marshall School of Business and UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, where he teaches this powerful business-driven design tool to top business school students. He holds a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Northridge.  

Activities for Ravi

Section Officer | Chair | 2021, 2022

Chair, Human-Centered Design Section

20/2X Recognition | 2021

Ravi Sawhney, FIDSA, is Founder and CEO of RKS Design and Chair of IDSA’s Human-Centered Design Section, leading with Meghan Preiss, IDSA, as Vice Chair. In 2020, RKS Design celebrated 40 years of disrupting the design marketplace; and in 2021, Ravi has continued to be a strong advocate for multi-disciplinary industrial design and the community of IDSA.

Throughout the pandemic, he tells us he has been inspired by how designers on his team and his clients have adapted to “our new virtual lives.” Whether in the design studio or from home, “we’ve found ourselves successfully collaborating and brainstorming with clients around the world, sometimes 30 people at a time! And we’re also building new connections and relationships between newer and older members of our team, and between our team and our clients, all virtually. Human resilience is amazing to see, and we’ve surely been incredibly resilient in this time.”

Ravi also finds motivation in how designers have responded to the challenges and the opportunities of the past year. “Private spaces, public spaces, products, and services have all had to be rethought for our new world,” he says. “Our team has played a small part in that, through reimagining office spaces and consumer and medical products; but as a design community we’ve truly risen to the challenge.”

Currently, Ravi and his team are “laser focused” on their clients and new group, RKS Digital. “With RKS Digital, we’re using our published human-centered design methodology called Psycho-Aesthetics—which we’ve used for so many successful products—to identify product-market fit for software products and experiences and develop them with our new software development team,” he says. “In some cases, we’re innovating and designing hardware and software together, creating a single hardware/software experience. There are so many software products out there, because it’s so easy now to create software. Our job is to help our clients be the signal in that noise.”

On a personal note, Ravi adds that he is “looking forward to another great year with the human-centered design IDSA group, co-chaired by my friend and former team member Meghan Preiss, now at Ford.”

Speaker | West DDC | 2017

P/A: A Fusion of Maslow & Campbell’s Concepts into a Design Thinking Methodology

For more than forty years, Ravi Sawhney has been designing and innovating for start-up companies—from innovators, such as KOR Water, to some of the largest, well-known brands including Pepsi, Sharp and Unilever.

In each case, his repeatable, scalable and universal tool has guided his RKS team to connect with the audiences it serves. Design is no longer just about winning awards and creating great portfolios—it’s much more. So often, RKS has helped improve the quality of people’s lives and provided levels of self-esteem that can only be created through insights into the “self.” P/A helps all stakeholders connect and relate to global audiences and their environments in ways that may be impossible otherwise.

Speaker | West DDC | 2013

Panel Discussion: Designer as Entrepreneur

Across the world many industries are undergoing a spectacular transformation. They are constantly trying to innovate, commercialize and glamourize their products for greater consumption. This timely opportunity gives the chance for many to compete and take risks with starting their own companies and introducing their own design solutions to the market. An all-star panel of design experts will talk about their experiences with launching a startup and how they survived and prospered. They will share their insights and real-life challenges.

Eric Paul Rose, NPDP, Panel Moderator
Gabriel Wartofsky
Vinh Phamdo
Ravi Sawhney, FIDSA

IDSA Award Winner | Fellow | 2009
IDEA Jury Chair | 2004