Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business [Hardcover]

Deepa Prahalad (Author), Ravi Sawhney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0137023480 | ISBN-13: 978-0137023486 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall; 1 edition (July 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137023480
• ISBN-13: 978-0137023486
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #294,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A solid portrayal of one company's approach to design thinking, March 14, 2011

By 

Mark P. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Predictable Magic is a book about design and its critical role in establishing a successful product, one that makes both a functional and emotional connection with its customers. The issue of design thinking and design practice is hot right now as companies look to compete in an ever competitive environment where cost alone is not the only purchase consideration. Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney's book is a solid addition to the body of research, stories and processes regarding design thinking.

This book is both a discussion of the need for design thinking and the demonstration of the author's particular tools to accomplish design thinking. This book is a portfolio of examples for Prahalad and Sawhney's company RKS and therefore its treatment of design thinking is limited to those practices. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but readers looking to understand the broader design thinking movement will need to look to other books.

The tone of the book discusses their (RKS's) success more than how you can be successful with design thinking. While this is understandable, it places the reader outside of the design process as an observer rather than considering that the reader wants to learn more about how you apply these techniques. That is the primary reason why this book is a three star review.

This book is good. Not as good as Tim Brown's Change by Design, which came out last year and really seems to define what design thinking is all about on a broader basis.

Strengths

The book takes a few examples, like the development of a cell phone, and works them through their process. This helps the reader see how each step in their design process.

The tools are helpful and well described. They include a Psycho-Aesthetics Map that positions a product and its competitors across multiple dimensions and a framework for developing a Persona profile. Both tools are explained well and illustrated with examples.

The book is short and focused making the ideas readily accessible in terms of the time it takes to read the book and the focus the book keeps on the topic.

Challenges

The book takes on the form of an extended commercial for RKS, the design firm the authors founded. While the firm must do good work, based on the examples, concentrating on what they know and frequent mentions of the company limit the broad application of its ideas.

The book tends to be encyclopedic in some places providing long bulleted lists and descriptions of aspects of design thinking with limited explanation or application. This makes for a comprehensive book, but one that bogs down in places and leaves the reader to figure things out for themselves.

The book, through its cell phone example, makes the implied claim that RKS developed the iPhone page 84 graphic. While the authors do not say this outright, if it were true than that would be a book in its own right. As it stands as implied it just takes away from the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Physcho-Aesthetics: Aligning Product design to Business Strategy, April 10, 2011

By 

Sam Santhosh "Sam Santhosh" (Pleasanton, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Product Design is mostly considered as an art form. However in `Predictable Magic', Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney introduces a framework that they call Phsycho-Aesthetics, through which the design process can be aligned to corporate strategy, enabling businesses to come up with successful product designs. Companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have shown how critical it is to build deep emotional connections between their consumers and product brands. But how do we map this process? How do we get business managers, engineering professionals and designers on the same page? Read this book to understand how the Phsycho-Aesthetics approach will help a company achieve this.

In the first part of the ebook, the authors show you how their framework can help in developing user-centric designs through consumer `personas', mapping business goals to product features, targeting specific segments with unmet needs, and develop market winning strategies. In the second part they take you through the implementation of the design strategy and how to continuously engage the customers. With many real life case studies understanding of the framework becomes very easy.

I am not sure if entirely new designs or concepts can be created using the Pyshco-Aesthetics approach, but it will definitely help any entrepreneur, business manager or designer in validating their product design approach. I would strongly recommend this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insights into the design process, February 3, 2011

By 

John Gibbs (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business (Kindle Edition)

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.