Ravi K. Sawhney (CSUN Art ’79) has spent more than thirty years at the forefront of product and technology innovation, and is also an author, lecturer, and thought leader on design and innovation. As founder and CEO of RKS, he has developed solutions for clientele in diverse industries, incubated companies, created licensed products, assembled a high-caliber team of colleagues, and accumulated accolades from the media and design juries recognizing the team’s hard work. He’s also established a powerful culture at RKS focused on the belief that “it’s not how you feel about the design or experience, but rather how it makes you feel about yourself,” which helps RKS consistently develop human-focused solutions with impact. He has led the firm’s portfolio of solutions for clients in areas such as healthcare, consumer packaged goods, appliances, housewares, sustainability solutions, entertainment/audio, consumer electronics, and lifestyle accessories. Recently Sawhney has been leading the firm’s efforts to deliver an absolute game-changer in the field of DNA sequencing with Ion Proton™, helping the blind better see the modern world with a new optimized smart phone, helping sustainable hydration acquire a sustainable foothold and helping introduce a revolution in live sound for performing musicians.
Sawhney invented the Psycho-Aesthetics® design methodology, which Harvard Business Press has explored as a business school case study. Psycho-Aesthetics® is also the central focus of Predictable Magic, a book co-authored by Sawhney and published by Wharton School Publishing in 2010. Sawhney has been inducted as a Fellow in the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) and recognized with an honorary Ph.D. from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He has spoken globally and at dozens of U.S.-based conferences as a keynote speaker, and lectures often at prominent design and business schools. Sawhney also contributes editorial on topics of design, business and innovation for FastCoDesign, HBR.com and Core77, and is the innovator/Jury Chair emeritus of IDSA’s Catalyst case program, championing design’s power to effect positive change in business, in lives and throughout the world.
Transcript
>> I'd like to welcome you this evening to the second season of our distinguished speaker series and [inaudible] College of Arts meeting and communication. Our guest speaker this evening is of course Ravi K. Sawhney from the class of 1978. He has an amazing list of accomplishments in his career since he left California State University in Northridge. I'm going to touch on a few of them. And then, I'm going to let the evening belong to Ravi because we all have so much to learn and enjoy from him and from his presentation. First of all, of course, he's founder and CEO of RKS Design. At RKS Design, he directs client projects that support their business objectives. He is responsible for all aspects of design and organizational management. Sawhney founded RKS Design more than 30 years ago. And I love this part; after leaving Xerox PARC where he worked on the early design of what is now a household item, the touch-screen interface. So, my goodness, my goodness, Ravi was way ahead of his time even in his time. He's a creator of a design methodology called Psycho-Aesthetics. He's the president of RKS Guitars, or was the president of RKS Guitars. I think he kind of got out guitar business. But then he shared with me this evening that he's back in that business a little bit again. He's a fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America. This is a very distinguished organization, and it certainly distinguished him that he is a fellow. He's a co-author of a wonderful book called "Predictable Magic". We have one or two copies over here that I know he'll be happy to sign for you at the end of the presentation this evening. He's a board member of KOR Water. He and his design team have recently started working on a very interesting project, cAir, pronounced "care" of course. And the concept is to redefine air travel for families, and I know he's going to tell you about that this evening. But what an incredible idea. And clearly, just creating something in his imagination and then really making something out of that, just almost air. He's named in over 200 patents, and is recipient of more than 130 global design awards. Please help me welcome Ravi K. Sawhney.
[ Applause ]
>> Can everyone hear me okay. So, thank you. Thanks, [inaudible]. It's great to be here, it's great to be at Cal State Northridge. I'm lucky I have some of my classmates from '78 who are here today. My parents are here also. My daughter, my wife. Lance, who's our creative director, who was one of my students when I taught here. So, yes, I graduated from the class of '78. And after leaving Xerox, I went forward into creating my own firm. And then in about 1985, I created another saying, that it's not how you feel about the design or the experience, that in fact it is how it makes you feel about yourself. And hopefully tonight, we'll see that that message, or that underpinning, or that understanding that I came to after leaving Xerox has run through the firm's work and continues today. That was a result of having work with all the psychologists while developing the touch screen. So that was a program by which I was the sole industrial designer and working with 30 PhD psychologists and developing something that, at that time as we were joking about, dinner that I thought would never be seen anywhere. And when I [inaudible] actually everywhere. So what I want to do is talk about what about design, what kind of work do we do, and how do we get there. So I'll start about design. And let's talk about design and designing. It was interesting, I went to Wikipedia and was able to pull a definition. Wikipedia is always--can be very surprising. And what they say is, "Designing often necessitates considering the aesthetic, functional, economic and sociopolitical dimensions both of the design, the object, and the process. And it may involve considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design." I was very surprised to read that they actually had captured that. They went a little further and they said, "Meanwhile, diverse kind of objects--" and I added 'and services', "may be designed, including clothing, graphical user interfaces, skyscrapers--" Thank you. My Mac is on.
[ Laughter ]
It's developing a life of its own. Let's see if we can get this slide back. So it said, "Clothing, interfaces, business processes, business models, and even the methods of designing." And then of course--I wouldn't say of course, but one of the things we do is we look outside at design. So design is something more than I think what we started as, when the four of us who are here today, went to school together, we learned to basically build models, make sketches, make renderings, do some mechanical drawings, and it's all about creating a thing. Today, designing is about solving problems. But you get some very unusual influences. As we looked around, people realized that there were some brilliant people like Einstein who had his own thoughts on problem-solving. And it's interesting, that ties into design, that you can't use the same processes that you got you into that situation to get yourself out of it, that designing is constantly reinventing itself. So one of the things I hope you'll see is that, as we started with a very much a skill level that it became a thinking process as designers. And that was something that we even learned in school here, and I think it was a very special time, that this was also a very special campus. One of the things we learned was that we could take these tools and do things that we weren't necessarily informed to do or taught to do, we weren't mentored to do. And we took it to another level. Another thing is design is about really creating these pathways. How do we really do something that creates a pathway for self-actualization? Now Gandhi is up here not just because he said, "Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human brain." He said that, and he's known for freeing India. But what's interesting is that he actually, as he was in the process of doing that, he was thinking forward and saying, "Now when my country is free, what will they do?" And when you see the Indian flag, it actually has a wheel. That's not a wagon wheel, that's a spinning wheel. And what you see, Gandhi is spinning cotton. What he was doing was teaching the culture to take the cotton that they would grow and spin it into threads and weave their own cloth because the cotton would go to England. And there, it would get turned into cloth and be sold back to India. And when he looked at it and said was that, "This is a means for us to raise our standard of living to become fully independent from an economic stance." It's interesting. And I don't know why this story isn't well-known. But that, you know, that's the other half of the formula, is that you can get everyone free. Then what do they do? So, you know, it's a design lesson for us. It says, "Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service." This is a third person who's not a designer. But in our eyes, they were designing as much as we do. You know, designing was something about the way they saw the world, the way they saw a pathway, the way they saw how to do things. That's no different from us looking how to design through sketching and model-making. In our business, design today is challenged. And I say like never before. This is the--that was the world.
[ Laughter ]
So this is the world as we see it. Populations are increasing. Vicinity of cities are increasing. National resources are becoming depleted. This is the reality of what we as designers are dealing with today. So it was great. It was a day when you could create everything you could ever dream of. People would buy it. Huge amounts of garbage. Today, the world is very different. In fact, we were talking about that at dinner, that there has been a change that we've seen in the world. We'll talk a little bit more about that. So our clients that we serve, we have their realities to deal with. We say 80 percent, I see numbers as much as 90 percent of new products fail. 70 percent of strategies don't get implemented. 30 percent of those are missing something major. And half of small businesses don't hang on more than five years. And we're asked to do something. Now that's not true for our numbers, but those are true numbers. The other thing we're seeing is the standard of living has become something that people strive for very consciously. And what you see here is microbanking. So the design and creation of microbanking again in India raised the standard of living for these people, for basically stay-home moms who are looking for ways to build a business so that they could do something better for their family, do something better for themselves. Now you see another name thrown in there; Maslow. So what is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself. I'm going to talk a little more about Maslow later on. And the other part that we've seen, and this is global, is that people are willing to work hard, they're willing to compromise on quantity so that they can have these great moments in their life where they share with their friends and their family, or they do something special where they have an exchange, a meal, a quality of time together. And they see the next person--I've got a lot of different people thrown in here. Here's Campbell, Joseph Campbell, "I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they're looking for the experience of being alive." And we'll talk a little bit more about Campbell. So that gives you somewhat a wholistic view of how we see design and how we see the world because it's really not about the skill of making something beautiful that drives us as designers, it's really the meaning behind it, it's really the meaning in life. You know, if you create, you know, and fortunate enough to be part of the Apple team and create a hundred million tablets, you know, iPads, that's a huge amount of product. And if you can do something that helps the world in the process, you can have a huge influence. So it's not about what we do as a skill. That's where we started. So you've seen the theory, but what I want to show you before I go into how we get there is a bit about what do we actually do. So one of the benefits that we had coming away from Cal State Northridge was that we weren't taught that there were any limitation to what we could do with what we learned. So as our eyes opened, as we grew and we explored, and we continue to, we're able to now today do a wide diversity of work. And I think what's happened is that, in our firm, it's unique because we're kind of like a college campus and we're all learning from each other. But not only are we looking at it philosophically, but we have a theory and a practice that I'm going to show everyone as far as how we work. But the litmus test is that people know it when they see it. And for all the theory, my test today is that can I put something up to everyone here that you can say, "Okay, yes in fact they do something with their philosophy, with their methods, with their talents, and their techniques, and their tools." So I'm going to go through a series of projects, and I think only one of these goes passed two or three years. So this is Hydropath. We've been working with a company called Hydration Technologies. They made a [inaudible], and we're working with them to help get this adopted for disaster relief. So [inaudible] is basically the original like celluloid film, it is the same fiber. It's made in [inaudible] and they drop into that sugar, electrolytes, vitamins, and flavoring. When you put that into water, it self-inflates. When it self-inflates, it strips away all the viruses and bacteria. You can drop one helicopter load of this, and that will be the equivalent of 15 helicopter loads of bottled water, which you don't ever want to drop at all.
[ Laughter ]
And so, the challenge has been the last mile. You know, we will forever be pleased with ourselves if we can positively affect one person's life. I mean, that's enough for us. If we could make one person's life better, we're thrilled, we're satisfied. This company is engaged with us to try to really affect, positively affect tens of thousands of lives in disaster relief when you can't get fresh drinking water. And you can last about three days without water. You may be able to go a month without food. But if you don't get that water, you will become desperate. And we have seen this demonstrated where we actually dropped [inaudible] into raw sewage. And the [inaudible] comes out, gets poked with a straw, and people drink out of it. It's pure, clean water actually with 150 calories. So you can imagine more the difference in the world something like that can make for people. We also do things like products. So this is a new product that is now just coming on to the market called Wikipad. So Wikipad is a commerce tablet that we designed that plugs into a gaming counsel. We've designed the products, the branding, the packaging, the website, the marketing strategy, and the graphics strategy. What you see on the screen, write down [inaudible] for this company. This is a new experience for people. It's a 10-inch, 10.1-inch screen if you hold it in your hands. The ergonomics are incredibly challenging because you have this large device that you're holding, and gamers don't play for five minutes. I'm not a gamer, but gamers play for extended periods. 10-inch screen that far from your face is about the equivalent of an 80-inch screen on the wall. It's completely immersive. And it's streaming games, so it's all coming through Wi-Fi. And now, the whole dynamic of the commerce changes. You don't buy a game, you rent a game. So, Sony signed up, others have signed up. This is a very fast-moving company. This is one of the Core water bottles. So again, products. But Core had a mission. Core's mission was that they came to us, I think now six years ago, and they said, "Water is being used by these types of bottles, which we all use. And 80 percent of these are ending up in landfills or in the ocean." They said, "And they have BPA," you know, because of polycarbonate. And what makes polycarbonate work is actually BPA which, at that time, they were starting to see signs that that was a health threat. We worked with Core to use design to create an emotional bond with the product so that the water would be beautified so it would be more elegant, more relevant to carry the water bottle than to carry something disposable. Reached out to Eastman Plastics, and we have a relationship with them from when we built guitars. And we explained the situation, we alerted them to the BPA threat that was emerging, how other countries were being very much alarmed by this material. And Eastman took it upon themselves to get very serious about this, and they actually developed the plastic that's BPA-free. So when you go see a baby bottle today, that's all Tritan, that's the material that came out of this program. In many countries, anything that holds food or anything consumable is banned to have BPA in those products. But the root of this is again the mission. Their motto is "Better me, better world. That I can do things better for myself. I can carry my water. I can go into a restaurant with my water, I can go into a meeting with my water. I don't have to look like I'm coming off a hiking trail. And at the same time, it's healthier and it's better for the planet." So one bottle, one-liter bottle for Core. So this bottle will cost a dollar. You can refill a water bottle like this 1800 times for that one dollar. So it just shows you how we've been trained to think about packaging and something as simple as water, and that we need to then use design as an emotional tool to transform how we feel about it. This is cAir, or c-Air. So we did a workshop three years ago. And in that half-day or one-day workshop, something was revealed about that families who travel always have this issue about the kids, and the kids aren't welcome, and the kids don't enjoy the trip , and it's become a real war. Kids are being banned on certain airlines. They're banned from first class. And so what we did was create a concept and we said, you know, over the past few years we said, "Someone is going to come up with an airline that services families and does it right." And as we evolved, we just kept going deeper and deeper into the whole experience. Not just the flight experience, but what it's like when you get to the airport, how do you--what's different about the transportation? Even to check in, what's different about checking in? What's different about the way you--how could the travel experience be if you have as many people traveling, have two kids. Well, if you have two kids and one is a baby and you have to change the diaper of that baby, what do you do with the other kid? You know, do you leave them in the middle of a crowd so they can just get scared and start crying? No, you have to design the bathroom that addresses the family issues. So we kept putting this together, and putting it together. And then finally, two weeks ago we said, "Okay, let's show it to the world. No one is coming up with this. Let's show it to the world, and maybe that'll stimulate some deeper conversation." So we actually put out a four-minute video that walks through the complete experience, and all of the touch-points, and everything we addressed. And within two weeks, we've had 200,000 people actually see it. And it's not that we know 200,000 people that we call.
[ Laughter ]
200,000 people have gone through this so far to see this. We've had people respond that they started crying when they saw this because they had such a terrible experience with their children flying, and now they're--and we've had people write to us and say, "We don't travel with our children anymore. We would love to take them to see our grandparents, but it's just too traumatic for everyone." So we're using design to say, "You know, maybe we can be in a picture of a different world. We don't have to do it for commercial reasons. We don't have to do it because we'll get some royalty or we'll get something out of it. Well, maybe we can make a difference between our design tools. And meanwhile, we flex our brains a little bit, we expand a little bit, we learn a little bit, we go somewhere." [Inaudible] talked about guitars. We did create a guitar company 10 years ago that came out of a program that was an exploration within the company. We ended up incubating a complete company. We sold 2000 guitars before we said, "You know, this is--we've got to decide. Are we going to be in the design business, or are we going to be in the guitar business?" And I chose the design business, that's what I do. But, you know, images started showing up like this. You know, the Rolling Stones in Europe playing one of our guitars You don't pay the Rolling Stones to play your guitars, they do what they want. Four guys with a hundred managers that travel with them. Amazing, amazing business in itself. But we developed something using our tools and our techniques, and our [inaudible] that got adopted, we're able to reinvent something that hadn't been touched since the 1950s. We're doing other interesting work. We found, in working with the head engineer for the acoustic lab for Apple, that he had an inspiration to do something different in home theater. And what we've realized is that people don't always want to drill holes and run speaker wires and speakers to get a great home theater experience. Many people are living in a townhome, they're a student, they're living in an apartment, they may move jobs every two years. And so what we developed was a system that comes in three boxes and they snap together. When they snap together, they electrically connect. You put a TV on top of it, you plug the TV into this unit, and you plug this unit into the wall, and you have a complete home theater system for a thousand dollars. We prototyped this to the Consumer Electronics Show, and now this is now going to market. So again, we do products, but we do products with an understanding of something about people's needs. This year also, this product came out. This is a smartphone for the blind. Very interesting program. The head of the program, the CTO and CEO is blind. So the founder of the company is blind. His head of marketing is blind. And as we are showing them the different models, the concepts, so we're showing them three-dimensional concepts, they're feeling them, the founder of the company finds one of the four phones that he likes, and he takes it and he puts it up to his ear. Well, people do that when you're designing phones. They're just kind of emulating something. And he then asks us, "How do I look?"
[ Laughter ]
And that was another affirmation of the human condition, that it's all about how you feel in the company of others. It's all about that need to get accepted by other people. So it wasn't about the technology. The technology is there, it has this Braille display, it has a GPS that the Braille display refreshes, and does everything that a smartphone would do for a normal person. But it also has to create a belonging for that person so that they're a part of society. Right? And I understand that when you see people who are blind and they still coordinate their clothes, and the design of their gear should be as well-designed as anything else. You know, that's another effect that Apple has, is that people understand the design. They understand what quality is. I mean, this phone is a $4,000 phone. There's no reason that it should look as if it's compromised. Other programs that we've done that, you know, we just get inspired to do is that we found that we started really understanding and researching into the meaning USA label. So that's actually COOL. It's a country-of-origin label. COOL is the actual acronym. And what we realized is that so much is designed in the US. And especially on the west coast, there is such an intensity to the creative forces here and the benefits that they create that there should be something beyond the label that says "Made in USA", or "Made in China", or "Made wherever". That if it's created here, why not put the label and say "Designed in USA"? So it doesn't necessarily mean that it's--it doesn't have to be manufactured here. But at least the origin of the creativity, or the thought, or the inspiration, or the innovation could be labeled. So we put this out. It's just a free, open source that people can download and use just to help move our society along. So why can't design at least something for all of us to feel better about ourselves, something we started using, other people have now started using? Back to more products. Give you an idea of kind of the diversity of the products that we do, the diversity of the services that we're involved with. And as I put this together tonight, I really wanted to show that diversity so that you could see the principles we're applying apply everywhere. Affordable ventilator for emergency situations. So if you're in an accident and they have to put a ventilator on you, this is the type of device that goes on you so that you can breathe since you can't breathe for yourself. Very successful product. It's a Swiss company called Hamilton Medical. The research that we do for them now is very interesting. M 0:31:35 Before we design products now, they actually ask us to go out into the field, we go to a hospital and go in the situations. We go and study and analyze, and put it all together. And then we come back with a brief and saying, "Your new product could be this, this, this, and this." And now they take it back and they go back, they engineer that technology, and then they come back and we go through the regular design process. But our clients are engaging us to go far further upstream. In fact, we do that for [inaudible], we do that for Intel. You know, Intel is a chip manufacturer. They air us to go out into the world and find new businesses and identify future businesses that may emerge. And then we design a business plan and a pathway as to how they can get their kind of revenue, they can generate what type of investment it'll take. And we're not MBAs, we do have MBAs onboard. But it's the same principles of design that we're applying to the business as we are to the human condition. This is a local company. Back to some great products. This is a local company called Line 6, and this is a network of wired PA speaker. So Line 6 says, "The technology, we put it together in the complete experience and package of a PA speaker that, if you're a single artist and you're playing in a small coffee shop, you can take one of these speakers with your acoustic guitar and a mic, and you can play it and you'll get great-quality sound." If your friend has one and you go to play a club together, and maybe you need a stage monitor, all you do is take one of them, turn it on its side, plug the two of them together, and it automatically turns that into a stage monitor. If you have another friend who comes along, you say, "Okay, here's my third musician," and he's got two of them, if you put those together in a daisy chain, they automatically adjust. If you add a subwoofer, it automatically adjusts. If you have a large theater for 2,000 people, you can hook all these up together, you can identify everything on your iPad, and you can actually go and sit where the audience would sit with your iPad and finish off the sound. Now we were in the guitar business. We used to be asked to go for a sound check. The artist would get there eight hours before the performance, and they might spend four hours doing sound check to get the sound perfect. With this technology, and with the iPad technology, all they have to do is the band comes in, they play for 10 minutes, it's recorded. And somebody else, they leave. Somebody goes out and sits in a different place of the audience, dials everything in. You know, hits a button, memorizes it. And that setup is there. In fact, if you're a doing a small club as people do, let's say every Thursday night a musician might do the same club setup. He might have three speakers. Well, this actually will record those three. So they say, "Okay, here I am at this club." They hit the button, everything is set if they dialed it in. You want to be prepared. How do you do that? And we turned it into a wholistic proposal and we pitched it to the Red Cross. We said, "Look, we figured all this out. It doesn't exist in the world. You know, can you guys do something with this?" And then I think last week they actually came out with some of the apps now so that you can actually do this. Again, we used our design tools because we wanted to see what we could do to make the world a better place. Not just try to find a royalty off of this, we're trying to sell this to the Red Cross. We just put it out and said, "Something good could happen from this." In the process of doing it, we became smarter people, we became better designers, and got to do things that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Back to technology and products. This is an incredible program that we've been on with a company called Life Technologies. So Life Technologies makes DNA-sequencing equipment. This year in January, they announced this product, which is called the $1,000 genome. So you can actually, in two hours, for a thousand do a human genome. So this product actually will change everyone's lives in this room. But the ability to do this means that you can do it just as a wellness check, or to forecast conditions that you might have, to adjust your lifestyle, your diet. If you're diagnosed with a disease, you will use this type of equipment to adjust your diagnosis to now customize your treatment. When they had [inaudible] that came up in Germany I think two years ago, they used a prototype of this technology and they quickly went in and started testing all the produce. And if anyone remembers, that all of a sudden they had [inaudible] and people were dying, and then it just shut down. Well, what happened is Life Technologies jumped in, used their prototype technology, and went in and sourced where the [inaudible] was coming from because they could do the DNA rapidly on produce. And walk right basically down the food chain right to where the source was. Same thing for animal produce. And we'll review of where we are design-wise. So, what's our process, how did we get here? So this is where it gets interesting for me, but I'll start to go a little quicker because this is a large process. But in order to get there, what we do is we look through four lenses. People are centered-lensed. We look at the brand, the value, meaning the business model and servicer experience. We combine that with discovery, creation, and execution, our underpinning. And you see a yield on the right. The yield is the journey that we want to take everyone through. I'm going to show you where we got that yield as we go through. We start by learning. I don't know how, but we were constantly researching in other countries. We're a small group. We're all over the world doing these global programs. We get smart. We understand people. And then I mentioned Joseph Campbell before. We started leveraging Joseph Campbell. And what we did was take the hero's journey that he discovered and he wrote about as a universal truth. In all society, in all cultures, there is the story of the hero. And what we saw was that there's a parallel, that everyone is on a journey every day of their life and that everyone needs to have a calling, which is an attraction, and engagement, which are the challenges, and adoption of the service or the product, and a moment of truth where other people affirm that you've made a smart decision, a good decision. And then after the moment of truth happens, you feel a little bit heroic and you feel causative, and your body language changes, maybe you get on the Internet and you blog about it. People ask you about it. Something changes. And what we've looked for is in everything we do to take everyone through this journey. So that's part of the underpinning. The other person you saw before was Maslow. And what we did was take Maslow and his brilliance and we looked at his hierarchy. So we took two psychologists and we melded them together, and we looked at Maslow and we said, "If we take the hierarchy needs and we translate that into a mapping system that we can actually map self-actualization vertically and interactivity horizontally." And as we started playing with this over the years, we created these four quadrants. And we mapped everything. We mapped people, we mapped ourselves, we mapped every situation that we've come across. And we're always looking through these crosshairs. You see a basic quadrant, a versatile, an artistic, and then a rich quadrant. Low self-actualization, low interactivity is a paperclip. High interactivity and low self-actualization is a [inaudible]. That's hands, feet, eyes. You're involved, but it's not self-actualized. Paperclips are not self-actualized either. You know, you think about it. You pick it up and you use it. But it's still high-designed, it's very well-designed. You say, "Okay, I want passive interactivity and high levels of self-actualization." We see the Mona Lisa as an example. And at the Mona Lisa, you have the experience of getting to the--you've got to get the parents, you've got to get in line to get a ticket to the loop. You've got to get in line to get into loop. You've got to get through the loop and wait in line to see the Mona Lisa. And then you get to see it, stand 15 feet away behind rope. It's behind glass, and it's smaller than you could ever imagine.
[ Laughter ]
But it is self-actualizing. You check the box. High levels of interactivity, and this is just an example for some people. This is not for all people, it's different for everyone. That's a Ferrari. That's not even for me, but that is an example. It's, you know, it's the color, it's the smell, it's the feel, it's something about it. And people who arrive and get that car, that is for them. Fully self-actualized and immersive. Now it changes in every situation. Now here are cellphones that I just put up as an example. This is an extract from a product we did two years before the iPhone. Sprint hired us to analyze, to complete phone market. And so, here's a basic phone, here's a consumer, here's Samsung, here's Nokia [inaudible]. Right? You've got versatile products and an opportunity zone before Apple occurred. As we analyzed and we create personas--personas are based on storytelling, and they're based on software. And we use them in design. We found that we could build personas to represent market statements. And we could map those also. And then if we studied the brand, we could map the brands also. So now, we're looking at three key things; the people, the brands, and the product or the service. What we saw at that time was that there were people who were living in this enriched zone, but the cellphone technology didn't meet all their needs. And when we came back to Sprint and said, "The only way that you could meet these people's needs who are unmet is that you would have to go to the touchscreen phone, and there's so much that they want to do you would basically create a service model where you would download apps and they would do what they wanted onto the phone." That was two years before the iPhone. I don't think Sprint did anything with it. You know, they're such a large organization. They really thought, "Wow, you know, we don't know where to go with this." But Apple is on the same wavelength. They actually came out with it. We all know that's history. And then finally, when we put all that together, it takes talent, it takes drive, it takes hard work, and you've got to create and you've got to execute. So all those designs that I showed you, they don't happen without actually executing. You've got to, got to execute. And this is just kind of some samples of what things look like when we actually get into these rooms. So what we do is we take all of them in the upper-right, we build these immersive rooms. Personas are up, the maps are up, everything we know is up, and you surround yourself. And this is part of the magic. So the book is "Predictable Magic". The reason we talked about "Predicting Magic" is that when you build a subversive room, it is amazing at what transforms, and how people come to life, how these ideas come out that you never imagined it would happen. No one person can do it, it's a collaborative sport. We actually taught 24 students from Cal State Long Beach yesterday who were all design students, and we took them through this experience for a full day. And they had four groups that all created new innovations in the marketplace, and then they all did an elevator pitch at the end of it. So it's a really, you know, if you get anything from me it's that after having been in this profession, I started working on this in college. I've been in this profession I think for 37 years. I'm more excited about it than I've ever been. Our story here. It's interesting that what my aunt said is that, "I've learned that people forget what you said and that people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." And she brings us full-circle back to what others are saying, to what we're saying, and to how we see design. It's simply a tool that we use to create these kind of effects on each other, ourselves, on people. What's the true benefit that we crave? The true benefit is that, at the end of the day, it's how do you feel, and how do you feel about yourself. Was that worth your time? In fact, was tonight worth your time? So with that, I hope you feel good.
[ Laughter ]
