The Award-Winning Strategy Behind Sustainable Product Design

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, I'm excited to have Ravi Sani. He's the founder of RKS Design, where there is human-centered global design firm. And something I'm excited to talk about today is you've reinvented the electric guitar to be more sustainable and usable than ever before in the RKS guitar, which is award-winning. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit before we get to the guitar or anything. This is your design firm. You founded it. I'd love to dive a little bit into where did this all start? Where did, where did you decide to be one of the ones that Start a whole design firm.

How did we get to where we are today from being a naive guy who thought he could break into the design business?

And solve everything?

I've always had a passion for design and art and studied industrial design in college, but started working in my early years. I think I was a sophomore when I started working in design firms. So I had a high skill level, but I graduated, went to work for Xerox in Xerox PARC, developed the first touch graphics for the first touchscreen interface, and didn't enjoy corporate life.

Okay.

It wasn't for me. I was much more driven to work. Like, yeah, everybody went home at 5. I was used to doing my work till 2 or 3 in the morning.

So yeah.

So, I left and said, I'll just kind of strike it out on my own. That was 1980. That was decades ago. And yeah, my passion for design was very, very strong, and I knew I had something to contribute. Coming out of Xerox, working with all these psychologists, I really learned that design is really a tool to affect the human psyche and benefits and the emotional state of people. of being that design is not a thing unto itself. It's simply a human factors tool. And so, that kind of early days before human-centered was a term, it was there at Xerox and some other leading organizations. And so, along the way, you know, it just kind of like slowly grew the firm with a strong dedication to creating great results for people. And, you know, here we are. Here we are all these years later. Going into our 45th year and just have had a great team of people come together better and better each year and doing incredible things that can affect the quality of life for people. You know, it's just kind of like not just me, but it's in everyone in this team that we all work together, we work well, we play well, and we're very results-oriented. And the results are that how do you affect someone's life? Not just design an object of beauty.

Yeah, I love that concept, that idea of design is the tool. It's really about shaping people's lives. And it is. It's— we lose that a lot of times. I feel like we're like, oh, it looks pretty, it's great. And then we reduce it to that. But it's good to remind people that it really is about affecting change in people's lives and improving it. That's what the tools should be.

It's easy to see, see a design that you've come up with and fall in love with it yourself.

Oh yeah.

And then, and then just perpetuate it, but it doesn't mean you're creating meaning.

Yeah. There's a difference between I like it and it's, you know, it makes me happy looking at it. And does it actually create the change or improve whatever I'm trying to actually improve? It's, I feel like it's hard as designers sometimes because we do get attached to our designs. Especially, you know, your first idea on something, you're like, oh, that's great. I like it. I did. I created that.

That's right.

But yeah, not always a good fit.

That's my baby. Yeah, the mantra I came up with in '82 was, it's not how you feel about the design or the experience, it's how it makes you feel about yourself. So that kind of goes, you know, to make it human-centered, turn the camera 180 degrees and say, look at it from a completely different perspective. And the more you study people, the more you can see the reactions to things in their lives and things you expose them to. You could tell their body language, you can tell their interest level, you can tell whether they're feeling inspired or they're being dismissive of it because you didn't connect with them.

Right. Yeah, those can be really little cues, right? It's sometimes hard to notice in yourself, but it's, I think it's sometimes easier to notice in other people when you show, you know, here's the ideas, here's the concept, here's the work, and see how they react to it too. I think that's sometimes a little bit easier than looking at ourselves. I guess that could be.

Yeah. Sometimes we're the only ones who understand what we did and why we did it. Typical is that how to use something. You know, you design it, you develop it, you perfect it, you perfect it, you hand it to the first person and it's like, it doesn't work because it's kind of like a chef tasting their own food. You got to be really astute to be able to tell whether it's going to be right for other people.

Yeah. I think there's a skewing, right? Because we put value on things that we put work into. And if you spent 100 hours building some design, right? You're going to have that lens of, I spent 100 hours, it's worth at least, at least whatever that is. And somebody else looking at it, they didn't spend 100 hours on it. They're just coming in and looking at its value to them. And so they don't have that layer of, I worked really hard on this.

That's probably the reason I developed my methodology over the last 30 years. Called psychoesthetics because you have to find a way to be objective and pragmatic and understand the personas and their pain points in their journeys and on and on and on. And so we as a team, but me personally, I've been working on this methodology. I think now I have my 5th publication is out called PA 2.0, Psychoesthetics 2.0. But I have a business. We have a Harvard case study on the methodology. There's a Harvard exercise taught in business schools. Then I have Predictable Magic. It was a business book. Then I have Psychoesthetics 1.0, which is more of a method book, and then Psychoesthetics 2.0, which hopefully is the last book I do because they are so much. There's so much work. But yeah, you got to have the rigor. You got to have a methodology. You have to be able to. Map things out in a way that you see it through the lens of the people who are the audience, who's using it, who's specifying it, who's approving it. How do they use it? How do they share it? Does it create a family event in terms of cooking? In medicine, there's always a multitude of stakeholders and decision makers and interested parties. They all have their point of view and they all have their needs and aspirations. And ultimately, the patient, they may not have a say in the technology, but when they look at that piece of technology that's going to save their life, the question is, does it make them feel reassured or does it just scare the hell out of them?

Right.

And we've all been there. I mean, medical devices are going through, I think, a revolution of design work because the emotional component for patients and for caregivers Everyone has an emotional connection to the interaction, the visuals. Does it look and feel like it's gonna be caregiving and, and provide health and wellbeing? Or does it look like it's gonna be intrusive and painful? And I think when we did the auto-injector for DNA serum, there's 5 needles that go in into the muscle.

Mm-hmm.

And we actually put those behind a shield and you don't even see 'em. And when the doctor pushes, it just feels like one needle prick, but it's actually 5 needles that go in that runs like, like different currents across the cells that allow the DNA serum to get in. But you can imagine if you see 5 needles coming at you, that's a lot. You're gonna, you're gonna, yeah, you're gonna tense your muscle up.

Right. Right.

And if you tense your muscle up, those needles are gonna be very painful. But if your muscle's relaxed, it's a different effect.

Yeah, I think that's a good point, especially, you know, in the medical field. It's depending— many of those things, right, you are in a very vulnerable position, right? You're already not doing well for some reason, right? That's, that's the whole reason you're, you're seeing a doctor and getting some kind of procedure. So you're, you're already in a not normal stress-free state to start with, right? There's no— you're not starting at a good baseline and And now the doctor walks in with a device that you're going to have— you could have a very visceral reaction to that you wouldn't if it wasn't you. You could be in a room and see that, but if you're not under distress medically, it may not affect you, but it does when you're the patient and it's happening to you. Yeah.

And you see that in my own doctor's office, they remodeled everything. Became very contemporary, very homelike, very relaxing. Every room you go in, from the waiting room to the reception area, everything is kind of like friendly, warm, appealing. Yeah, you feel safe and secure.

Right. Which you should. I noticed that with the medical buildings, like even taking my kids to the dentist and stuff like that. It's so much, so different from when I was a kid. Where it was basically empty walls, your very sterile room. And now it's like there's, there's paintings and there's things on the wall and there's, so there's, there's life in the room.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and it's, I like your description. It's much more homey than medical office. You're not being put in this sterile room or, and it's sterile, but it feels, it feels a lot more homey.

Yeah. So it's not how you feel about the doctor's office. It's how it makes you feel about yourself.

Yes.

It all comes back to the self.

Yeah. Well, that's how we, how we interact with things. Really quick, this process, right? Your psychoesthetics. You said you started this back in the '80s is when you started, but you've done research. You've gotten research. I've done a book on our process. I haven't gotten into research studies yet.

Oh yeah.

Could you talk a little bit about that? Because the research side of— for design, I feel like is one of those— I was just at the IDC convention for industrial design, and they were talking about how that's— there's not enough. They want to do more, more on the research side. And not many people do research studies on design processes. So talk about it.

Well, so you were in Austin and that's— and that they were talking about.

Yeah.

They need to do more of it. Look at it this way. You gotta have a foundation, right? You're building a house. You gotta have a solid, solid foundation. How do you build that solid foundation if you don't figure out who it's for and you don't do that initial ethnography? The analysis of who people are and why are they. So in our case, we've done— our own design team does the research itself. So we've done— we have one of our leads is in Warsaw now interviewing doctors, and they're showing them prototypes and talking about this procedure. But we've done well over 3,000 interviews globally. And so you have to know, you know, the audience is people. And so, you know, you start by segmenting the audience, understanding that's critical. We usually build a profile map of the demographics of who the audience is, which is critical. That's your cornerstone you build that on. You know, this kind of work for me started when I was at Xerox in the '70s. Everything we did, we were testing, we were interviewing, we were researching because we're trying to get— in that case, we're trying to get someone to touch a TV monitor, which you weren't supposed to do.

Right. Yeah, that's overcoming a really ingrained behavior.

Yeah. So industrial designers, I think, do great research because as they're doing the research, they're kind of always synthesizing and fusing and connecting the dots. And formulating and seeing things that a researcher who doesn't have to bring something to life may not see or observe. Whenever I go to a comedy show, I'm always impressed how a comedian can see something in everyday life that we overlook, and they, they show us how funny it is. As designers doing research, we see the nuances that somebody else might look past. Did they hesitate to touch the object? Did they kind of like look around to see how other people were looking at them, even if there's no one there, because they're embarrassed to be around that object? There's when they're interacting with it, is it natural, intuitive? A big part of what we do is, and I share it in my publications and share it everywhere I can, we map out Maslow's hierarchy in a way that we map interactivity against self-actualization. And then, we always look at the hero's journey. So, we always are thinking about how do we take someone on a journey that makes them feel positive about themselves. And so, how do we use design as a tool to attract, engage, affirm, lead to adoption, fulfill a moment of truth? And then hopefully, you feel good about your purchase yourself. You share it. You do things like that. Most mundane product— I guess that's not a good term— but we did a can opener. We did a whole series of products for a company called Zyliss. It's a global company.

Yeah.

And our can opener, we just observed and observed and observed. And now as we're using can openers, we're thinking like designers and we're thinking through our eyes. And one of the things that occurred to me is that just this weird— you puncture the can And now you rotate and holding that, and if you get distracted, you release that a little bit, creates a void, and you take so much concentration just to open the can. Why don't we just have the 2 handles click together once you puncture the can, and then you just rotate the knob? You can watch TV, you can talk to someone else, you know, you can do things just naturally and intuitively.

Right.

And I think last count, that had 44,000 positive reviews on Amazon. Can opener.

You don't have to keep the can open. The grip strength, that is a great point, right? You have to focus on squeezing it really hard because you're afraid, if you're thinking about it, you're afraid that you'll accidentally release it and then mess it up.

That's right.

And you have to do it again, start it all over again. Yeah.

And then if you've got arthritis or you've got anything else that falls in the category of universal design, You know, you may not be able to do something as simple as opening a can because of that. You might have diminished strength, or you might not have strength in one hand over the other, but you need both. There's all kinds of reasons to make it a better experience. But, you know, that's on the simple level that, you know, how do you create something like a can opener better? And then as you started, when we started experimenting with creating a new generation of guitar, That's a whole new realm of interactivity.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Well, let's dive into that, right? This guitar, love the design, it's great, and have some great reviews from great guitarists because the electric guitar hasn't really changed much since it was invented, right? It's pretty much looked the same, been the same. Pretty sure you could swap out parts over decades and decades of different models. It all is pretty similar. And you've taken on this challenge of redesigning it and making it more usable and more sustainable, which is something I also think people just don't think about how, what goes into making an electric guitar and its sustainability factor. So how, I guess, what was the drive? What sparked this going, hey, let's do a guitar that hasn't been changed in years?

Well, we started with me complaining about guitar stands and saying, they're all, you know, they're all pieces of junk. And how can you put these beautiful guitars on these pieces of junk? I said, let's look at just like redesigning the guitar stand. And we had a lot of guitar players and they all said, why not? Let's do a guitar instead. And naively it's like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do a guitar. So we took it through the full psychoesthetics process. We mapped the different types of guitars and good types, styles of playing. And then we started to study the market and we said, wait a minute, you know, guitars really at that time weren't sustainable. They were using tonewoods from the rainforest and we're losing an acre, an acre of rainforest to get one tree of tonewood that was, you know, had the right resonance. I mean, it was crazy.

Wow. Yeah.

And so he said, well, we're not going to do anything that affects any acreage of rainforest. There's got to be a better way to do this. So we started looking at different materials, started concepting. We must have had in the studio in one room, we must have had 70 different guitars.

That's awesome.

And we had hollow body guitars and solid body guitars. And then we had this concept that said, wait a minute, what if you could create kind of this open architecture guitar with— that was open-ended? So it's kind of an open-ended hollow body. What would that do to the tones? That would create a new sound that no one ever had. And then as we looked at it further and further, we came across the cellulose plastics, which is basically pulverized cottonwood. With very low percentage, single-digit percentage of plasticizer, that are from farm-raised cottonwood. And we looked at using farm-raised material for the kind of the core, the neck through. And we looked at farm-raised material that we stained to look like rosewood. And then aluminum, which either recyclable or recycled, but most importantly, Yeah, we designed this guitar to last hundreds of years. So not only did we start with all sustainable materials, but we also, you know, designed something that said 200 years from now, somebody should be able to plug this guitar in, assuming we still have a planet. You know, that's a whole nother— that's a whole nother conversation. Assuming we still have a planet that you could plug this in. And that it need never be thrown in the trash and it could always be used.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, it really is just embedded in our ethos that whatever we do, we're going to design something that has least amount of aspects of being disposable. And if it is disposable, that it's recyclable, except for anything that's biohazard, of course, in the medical arena. That it's reusable, that it's recycled. It's the basic ethos of a better world. And again, back to, you know, we go back to the hero's journey. I looked this morning, we were going to have this conversation, and I looked on the side and there's like 3 or 4 boxes of paper from Amazon from this week. And you say, there's got to be a better way. You can't tell me all that paper is getting recycled. You know, you just kind of like always think about making better products. One of the things we're very fortunate about is that I think from the 1970s and '80s where people were, buy a toaster for $10 and then buy another one next year for $10, and this whole kind of nature of where people believed products like that were consumable, they've transformed thanks to design. Design gave us a more emotional experience that justified us paying more for a better product and one that we don't have to replace, which is truly impressive. I sit in a Herman Miller chair that was very expensive that I bought 32 years ago. Never been repaired. The leather's worn. Yeah, great.

But part of the product, though, that's a feature.

That's a feature. It's the wear. It's the patina. But it's not worn out. And so I think thanks to great design, People have been transformed. So, you know, that was part of the thinking of the guitar. The biggest challenge once we got there was actually making a guitar that played perfectly, that balanced perfectly, that a musician could pick up and instantly play.

Mm-hmm.

And if they closed their eyes, they felt like they were playing an instrument that was familiar to them and they could play without having to think about And we used to have this challenge and we went through, I don't know, maybe 50 prototypes of guitars. We used to hand, hand a musician the guitar and sometimes they would play it for a few minutes and they'd hand it back and say, nice. And that was kind of like the, oh shit.

Yeah. You know, not the reaction you want.

Yeah. Eventually we got to the point where We'd hand them the guitar and they would start playing. And then they would look down at the guitar and like, I can't believe what I'm playing. And then they would just keep playing. And literally, like when we would go to NAMM, we'd have to ask people that like, let the next person have a turn. And we'd have world-famous musicians who were brought in by other companies coming to our booth to play our guitars on their breaks because they enjoyed playing them so much. And then we got picked up by the Rolling Stones and the Who and the Eagles and Beck and Clapton. And I brought in Dave Mason, who, uh, is from my generation, who's a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, uh, co-founded the band Traffic, recorded with the Beatles, the Stones, Did a lot of work with Clapton, pretty much, you know, was best friends with Jimi Hendrix, brought Hendrix All Along the Watchtower. So Dylan sent it to Dave. Dave was having a party at his house. Jimi and him were together every night. They were never separated. And Dave played it for Jimi. Jimi said, I love this song. Let's go record it. Dave and Jimi left the party, which was at Dave's house, And then they got the rest of the band together and they recorded All Along the Watchtower. So Dave's on 12-string, of course Jimmy's, you know, on lead, you know, and then, you know, the guitars broke into, you know, guitar royalty just instantly because the balance was perfect, the tones were incredible, they were different, the look was appealing, you know, it made the musician feel like a better musician. And we did things that actually made him a better musician. Because we were able to put the pickup selector where you could change selectors on the fly because it was right up there by your thumb. And we put the volume control right under the play area so you could do a pinky swell while you were playing on the fly. And then we had— we developed great sustain, and then we got great tonal range. So, you know, we nailed it. We nailed it all. on the guitar. And, you know, for that reason, the thousands that are out there and that are still being produced by the guy who set up the factory, who was my— one of my design directors, Paul Janowski, you know, he's still building them to this day. You know, you see it in guitar museums. It really became a legacy product for me and the firm, something that you don't usually get to do as an industrial designer. We design the watches, might have some legacy. Chairs have legacy sometimes. Not much else. But for the most part, yeah, not much else, right?

There should be more. I love your point of designing a product to last 200 years. I feel like that's part of— it's hard to have a legacy product when it's a kitchen appliance that people throw away. After 5 to 10 years, it just kind of loses the legacy part. And I think KitchenAid is probably the one that stands out. Those things, those mixers, people keep forever. But other than that, right, there's not many. No one's really attached to their silverware set or anything like that. It's very just the thing you buy and you Yeah, but it's changing. Yeah.

Changing bit by bit, it's changing. And I think the more emphasis on global warming, the more it's kind of getting into everyone's DNA. And again, it's back to the hero's journey. When I have to throw away all that paper that came in with things I ordered, I'm really not feeling that good about myself. But if the box was reusable or was, you know, something that I could reuse, Something that collapsed into minimal amount of material, I'd probably feel better about myself. Now, I get back to the product. Bought a product that's going to last a long time. That makes me feel good that I'm not going to create a bigger garbage patch. We've done a lot of— speaking of garbage patch, we've done a lot of work on water bottles and water filtration. Core Water is the water bottle we designed. had helped launch as a company. And Flowater, it's a company that we helped launch that was started by a college student, did his thesis on all the garbage showing up on the beaches. He was a surfer, competitive surfer, and he got sick and tired of seeing the stuff floating up on the beach. And so he just built a crude prototype of a water filtration system. Got sponsors to buy water bottles, and people started just refilling. And that turned into Flow Water, which is a global company. And we did all their branding, all their design and and engineering for their product that's been out a long time. And then we've done even more advanced products for another major water player that'll be out this year. But you know, having getting rid of All the disposable bottles—it's critical. When we did Core Water, at that time we were researching and we found that BPA was in the plastics that we were all eating and drinking from, and we back traced to the health hazards of BPA, and we worked with Eastman Chemical to come up with a BPA-free material because we're the team at Core and we. Just said, we can't possibly launch this beautiful bottle into the market knowing that it's got chemistry in it that's unhealthy for people. So along came Tritan, you know, as a material which is ubiquitous in anything that touches food or fluids that go into your body. What are baby bottles for? Do you really want to be feeding your baby something that has BPA in it? Which is basically a synthetic estrogen and has all kinds of negative impact.

Right. No, you don't want that. Not especially babies, right? That are the most vulnerable. So yeah, there's this shift, right? People have cared about this stuff for a long time, but I think it is more, I think we're We're at this stage where at least it feels like we have a lot more attention and people are thinking about this more and voting more with their dollars towards better options. And to your point of people are caring more about long-term products, buying stuff that'll last and thinking about that. There's a great term I've heard, maybe you've heard it, emotional durability. And that basically describes how much emotional investment do you have in an object that makes it worth keeping and taking care of. And so talking about guitars, maybe think of this because instruments, if you play an instrument, those instruments have typically a very high emotional value. Because you play it, it's music. There's so many emotions and memories tied to it, right? Like, I play the violin. I still have the same violin since I was a teenager and bought it. Like, I will never get rid of it. But because that has really high emotional value, I still play it, but I'll repair it. I'll take care of— like, I'm going to take care of that much more Then can't think of too many other things. Watch— I have a watch and the violin from when I was a teenager. That's—

Yeah.

There's not much else that I have that is like, I'm going to keep this forever kind of thing. And so that concept in design is— I've heard a few people talk about it, and I think that's kind of mirroring this shift of people going, how do we start to design more? Because people are wanting that more. these emotionally durable things that we'll take care of and we'll have and we'll keep the guitar for 200 years because we actually value it and want to do that.

Yeah. That's good for design and it's good for people and it's good for the planet.

Yeah. You get it all.

You get it all.

Yeah. Can't have it all. It takes a little work, but you can. It's possible. You mentioned, you know, you've done some other work in sustainable products and things like that. I'm curious what your— and we talked a little bit about it, but how do you see— because sustainable products, right, in the market for them has changed a lot, right? Especially you've been designing since the '80s, Xerox, right? I worked at HP. There's that mentality. There's a lot of smaller brands coming out that are sustainable focused. How do you see that market changing? Do you, does it, from all the work that you're doing, is it changing? Is that growing quickly? Is it kind of, what's your, what's your thoughts on that?

Great questions. We always look as we're doing our innovation work and our Design work for USPs, right? You know, HP, you know. So we always look for 3 to 5 unique selling points, things that are meaningful. I don't think sustainability is a unique selling point. I think it's a given that you've done things properly and you've made them as sustainable as possible. But I don't believe people are necessarily looking at things and saying, hey, this This one's sustainable, this isn't. If you see one that's not sustainable, that it's obvious that this wasn't conceived well and this is going to grow the garbage patch in the ocean or grow the amount of garbage in the world or negatively affect global warming, that you're going to run and hide from that so quickly. I think it's just in our instinct now and it's in our DNA. That we have such negative disposition towards non-sustainability as opposed to— so it's the fear of an unsustainable product, I think, that overpowers positive feeling of getting something that's sustainable. Because everything that you buy should be as sustainable as possible. Doesn't mean everything is recyclable. Doesn't mean that everything is perfectly sustainable, but it should be as good as it can be. And, but boy, if you see something that's just wasteful, you know, I think generally people's reactions are, well, because it makes you feel bad, right?

And going back, circling all the way back, right? It goes back to if you buy it, how, how does that make you feel? And right, your point of, oh, I have all these paper and boxes from shipping stuff on Amazon, right? Doesn't make you feel as good as if it was less waste, right? You need to have that less. So that's impacting how people are buying. And I think this is pretty true, right? Because you're coming from the design and the design research side. I've talked with PR companies about this that are focused on sustainable products. They're saying the same thing. They go, hey, we— because companies will come to them and go, hey, we have a super sustainable product. And then their next question that comes up is, well, that's cool, but what else does it do? Like, what's your actual feature set? Because it's, you know, I think there was a period maybe a decade ago where you could just be sustainable and that was like a feature because it wasn't close to even 50/50. But now we're at that point where I agree with you, it's more of an expectation of, well, Of course you should have done this. Like, this is almost more of like a best practices for business standpoint of it's just another thing you do. And no, it's not a feature. It's supposed to be there.

Yeah, we as designers, we're on our own hero's journey, right?

Yes.

And when it leaves our hands and goes into the world, How do we feel about ourselves? And I think the industrial design community is very conscious and conscientious about sustainability, quality of solution, the longevity of a product. This is all stuff that I think we focus on. And we do it intuitively or naturally, even if it wasn't taught to us. That, you know, it's a better world. It's a better world by doing a better job.

Well, and I think as especially industrial designers, it's not like that part of us turns off when we go home, right? And you stop working. You're sitting in your office, you're sitting at your kitchen, and you're still noticing all these things still, right? You're noticing, oh, there's waste here, there's things. So I think it makes it, to your point, we really pay attention. We're conscious of these things and it mixes back and forth, right? You sit in your house and you go, oh, there's way too much garbage from this particular product. Like, if I ever work on a product, like, I know not to do that. I'm paying attention to those things. And it's, I think that's part of the acceleration. I think of this into a requirement is we're all sitting at home going, well, this isn't very sustainable. This isn't.

Yeah.

This isn't what I want. Like, I can't— I wouldn't want my name attached to designing that product. I'm, I'm gonna go— when I go design stuff, I'm gonna design it this way. And we're slowly just— well, maybe not even slowly, but we're shifting. We're shifting the design as a whole to be much more sustainability is just there. It's just part of our process, really. And that's, I think, what it's taken is to get it into our process to where, as industrial designers, we're like, yeah, it's just part of— are we designing it? Cool. Yeah, this is part of our process. It just is. It's one of the things we do and we look at. There's the human factors and there's sustainability.

Yeah, we juggle a lot of balls as designers. We spin a lot of plates. Definitely sustainability, but I think it started— I think it did start decades ago, but like you said, yeah, the transformation sounds like we're in agreement about the transformation that sustainability is a given, not an option.

No, and I'm excited to see this shift to where it is a given and it's an expectation. It's a different— I'm excited to see what the next decade of design comes out with because It's a different mindset. We've gotten here, but a decade of having that mindset, that's going to yield us a different world. At least that's my hope.

Yeah. The question is, how do we keep the new generation of designers thinking deeply about it? Because the bar has risen so high on beauty of design, that is such a big challenge For, you know, for young designers, we have to also make sure that they're thinking about everything else goes into the mix.

We're spinning a bunch of plates. That's just one. That's just— beauty is one of them. You can't drop the others.

It's just one of a dozen plates. Yeah. Yeah. Keeps us motivated, keeps us challenged, keeps us interested.

Yes. There's always some new challenge, problem solving. It keeps us solving things no matter what. Amazing. This has been a really great conversation. I really enjoyed this and getting your perspective on things. To wrap up, I'd love just for you to share. I know you have a couple books, you have obviously your design agency. What's for people that want to learn more about What you do, your design philosophy, um, Psychoaesthetics, things like that. What's the best place to find you, reach out?

Oh, so Psychoaesthetics is available on Amazon. Perfect. Psychoaesthetics 2.0. Our website's RKS Design. On LinkedIn, the RKS Design site is always posting, you know, how did we make this happen? What did we do? We call them visual essays. So they're not, you know, they're just quick visuals that walk someone through so they kind of like get a feeling what the process was like. But the book Psychosthetics 2.0 shows how we applied the methodology to sustainability for Unilever, to, for down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, to student debt reduction. To product design, to branding. So, psychoesthetics just has so much viability as design goes beyond product to company innovation. We show how we innovated a new business model for Intel, became a new division of Intel. We're industrial designers. We're not just— it's interesting that how industrial design evolved from doing the it to doing more and more and more. And talking the language and, you know, being invited to the table and being invited, you know, onto boards. I'm on at least 4 different boards, one international company, a few startups, and the student loan— the founder of Finita, which is the student loan reduction program. So we not only like the guitar company, not only we came up with the idea about how to reduce student debt. We actually incubated the company, raised all the money for it, you know, $3 million for it, and launched that company, and then merged with another company and exited. So, you know, how, as a designer, let's say we're spinning bigger plates than we ever imagined.

Yeah, it's, you know, going to the conference and talking with just industrial designers for 2, 3 days, it's interesting just how, you know, you go to school initially and you're like, oh, I'm going to design hard goods. And that's, you know, most people's entry point, right? Is, oh, we're going to make some products. And then you talk to people and they're like, oh no, I'm over here innovating in business and branding and I do packaging and I do, you I really think it goes back to your initial comments of it's design as a tool. It's this tool of change. And there's so many— it's hard to comprehend, especially when you're like a freshman going into college, how much you can use the degree to do different things. But it is more of this problem-solving Yep, exactly. And that, you know, problem solving, there's, there's so many things out there beyond just physical products, uh, and we can apply these design thinking ideas to a lot of things besides that, and we can expand it. And it's, it's great. I love that you're, you're—

It's even problem identification. Yeah, you know what, go find the problem and then solving it. But yeah, I donated 100 books to the educators at the conference, 100 copies of PsychoCetics 2.0. I couldn't attend the conference because we were at a launch in Yerevan, Armenia. So we launched, took us 5 and a half years, but we redesigned the hookah so that it eliminates all the use of coals, which are giving off carbon monoxide. People are inhaling the carbon monoxide. The room's filled with carbon monoxide. So we developed a complete electronic battery-operated system that— yeah, crazy challenge. I mean, you've got everything going on. You've got fluids and you've got heat and you've got electronics. It's got to taste perfect and it's got to gurgle. The gurgle has to be perfect and they have to be able to blow a big cloud. And on top of that, we have all this underlying safety elements that say, you know, we want to eliminate all the use of coal that's so hazardous. You wouldn't sit in your house on top of a coal stove burning coal. You would know that you're probably not going to wake up in the morning. Here's a hookah with all these coals sitting on top of it and people right next to it. So yeah, exciting.

That's awesome.

Lots of interesting challenges.

There's always, you know, I never would have thought of redesigning a hookah or electric guitar, right? We, I feel like we always run into these things where there's just products and there's, there's something, right? And then, and then somebody goes, hey, there's a problem with it. That's actually, if we actually want to fix it, and it comes some very odd, odd things you just never think about. And then you're working on it and you're like, oh, this is There's a lot here. It's a big challenge. There's a lot that we could improve, and you just, it gets expanded more than you would've guessed.

Yeah, it was more than meets the eye for designers.

Absolutely.

Well, it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure, Ian. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Yeah, you as well. Thanks for being on the show. And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable, your business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.