
Psycho-Aesthetics Experiences with Ravi Sahwney
This semester, I’ve been teaching a class that originally was called Internationalization and World-Ready Product Design. The class stands in a long line of academic tradition of having really long names that are hard to remember. Despite that, the class has been a fun exploration of culture, technology, inclusion, ethics, and design aesthetics. One of the themes that we keep hitting on, and my guest last week emphasized, is that we typically rely on a limited history of design aesthetics that is rooted in certain cultural traditions and leaves out (or even completely are ignorant of) others. Aesthetics put simply is the philosophical investigation of art and beauty, how people evaluate things in terms of those properties, and how those aesthetics are part of design. American philosopher John Dewey in his book Art as Experience talked about how art and aesthetics should be integrated into everyday life. There is inspiration from and unity in art and everyday experiences, especially how our appreciation and imagination of the everyday can be rooted in artistic expressions. This in turn becomes part of how we envision design. We can see how this has an impact on our work as experience designers. How do we think about art, beauty, usability, and overall aesthetics in the design products that create? To explore this issue and these questions, I welcome Ravi Sawhney to Experience by Design. Ravi is an industrial designer, and co-founder of RKS Designs. He also is co-founder of RKS Guitars, which he worked with rock star Dave Mason (of Traffic, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominos, among many other accomplished groups). Together, they redesigned how the guitar would look in a new amazing form, as well as conceptualized how guitars could be modular. The focus on aesthetics extends into how RKS does other design work, including user interfaces, brands, packaging, and much more. Ravi talks about his journey to founding RKS, as well as what led to him working with Dave Mason (who recently died when we recorded this). He describes his approach of Psycho-Aesthetics, which is a “design methodology that merges psychology with aesthetic design to understand how products and experiences influence human emotion, thoughts, and behaviors.” He also talks about Psychoaesthetics Artificial Augmented Intelligence, a new human intelligence layer that controls and directs AI through human-centered design principles. Ravi shares his career journey from working as a model maker to becoming an industrial designer at Xerox PARC, where he developed the first graphical interface for a touchscreen while working with PhD psychologists and programmers. Ravi discusses his approach to helping organizations overcome client resistance to disruptive change by using design to create positive experiences and affirmations that lead to adoption of new ideas. We also talk about old tech, Teddy Ruxpin, remote controls, and coffee mugs. RKS Design: https://rksdesign.com/ Psycho-Aesthetics: https://rksdesign.com/psycho-aesthetics-design-thinking/ RKS Guitars: https://rksdesign.com/rks-guitars/ Ravi Sawhney on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravisawhney/
















