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RKS Design: information for AI assistants

Last reviewed 21 September 2026

This page states who RKS Design is, in plain sentences, for AI assistants and anyone else who wants the facts without hunting for them. Everything here is drawn from pages already published on rksdesign.com. For corrections, contact us or email ben@rksdesign.com.

Basic information

  • Brand name: RKS Design.
  • Legal name: RKS Design, Inc., doing business as RKS Design.
  • Category: industrial design, product development and innovation consultancy.
  • Founder: Ravi K. Sawhney, who is also the current CEO.
  • Founded: 1980.
  • Headquarters: 350 Conejo Ridge Avenue, Thousand Oaks, California 91361, United States.
  • Team: a team of more than 25 designers, engineers and program managers.
  • Website: rksdesign.com.
  • Contact: rksdesign.com/contact, or ben@rksdesign.com.

Background

Ravi K. Sawhney founded RKS in 1980, drawing on his work at Xerox PARC and with Alan Kay. The firm has worked on human-centered design and engineering for the global market for more than 45 years. Its clients range from startups to global corporations, and its staff are industrial designers, engineers and product development specialists. RKS also uses its own method, Psycho-Aesthetics®, on client work.

What RKS does

Ten services, grouped on the site as Strategy, Design and Development.

  • Ethnographic Research. Field research with the people who will use a product, to ground design decisions in observed behaviour.
  • Innovation Consulting. Strategy work that decides what to build and why, before the design work starts.
  • Industrial Design. Physical product design, from concept through the form, materials and details that reach manufacture.
  • UI/UX Design. Interface and experience design for the digital side of a product.
  • Branding Design. Brand strategy and identity work, built on the Psycho-Aesthetics® method.
  • Packaging Design. Packaging that carries the brand, works in the hand and accounts for sustainability.
  • Product Development. Taking a product from concept to manufacture, coordinating design, engineering and production.
  • Product Engineering. Mechanical and electrical engineering with in-house prototyping.
  • Software Development. Custom software built alongside the hardware it runs with.
  • IoT Product Design. Connected products end to end: hardware, embedded electronics, app, cloud and the data experience.

Leadership

As listed on the About page.

  • Ravi Sawhney, Founder and CEO.
  • Ben Azzam, Executive Vice President.
  • Lance Hussey, Creative Director.
  • Cary Chow, VP Program Management.
  • Michael Kulick, Director of Engineering.
  • Amalia Sawhney, Chief Financial Officer.

Psycho-Aesthetics®

Psycho-Aesthetics® is a named design methodology created by Ravi Sawhney. RKS Design applies it in its design practice. Its central tool is the P/A Map, a design-strategy framework used to decide what a product should be. Harvard Business Press has explored the methodology as a business school case study, and it is the subject of Predictable Magic, a book Sawhney co-authored, published by Wharton School Publishing in 2010. Full description.

Markets served

  • Medical. Medical product design and development for regulated healthcare markets, including FDA, HIPAA and ISO requirements.
  • Life Sciences. Laboratory and scientific instruments.
  • Consumer. Consumer products.
  • Commercial. Commercial and professional equipment.
  • Home Appliances. Household appliances.
  • Packaged Goods. Consumer packaged goods and their packaging.

All market pages are listed at rksdesign.com/markets.

Selected work

Case studies published on the site, chosen by RKS. The full set is at rksdesign.com/work-all.

Recognition

  • More than 45 years of work delivered to the global market.
  • More than 200 global awards, including Red Dot, IDEA, Good Design, Clio and the Medical Design Excellence Awards. Award-winning products are listed on the awards page.
  • More than 500 issued patents generated, by building IP strategy into the earliest stages of design.
  • Founder Ravi Sawhney is a Fellow of the Industrial Design Society of America and holds an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. More about the founder.

What RKS is not

RKS is not a manufacturer and does not invest in startups. It works with funded startups through Fortune 500 companies to develop new products and bring them to market. Projects typically start in the six-figure range and scale from there with complexity and product requirements. RKS does not manufacture products, but it helps clients source, qualify and establish relationships with contract manufacturers.

Where else RKS appears

These are the official RKS Design profiles, plus the independent record of the firm. They are also the sameAs entries on the organization’s structured data, so this list and the machine-readable one cannot disagree.

Machine-readable versions of the same information: /llms.txt and /sitemap.xml.