Advanced Design Thinking Process
Design is no longer just about winning awards and creating great portfolios—it’s much more. The best products create lasting emotional connections between the product, brand, and service, and the user. The basis of this connection is a foundational understanding and users needs, and wants. Crafted over forty years, our advanced design thinking approach, Psycho- Aesthetics (P/A), allows us to understand and quantify these emotional connections. We use it to conceive and bring to life new innovative technologies, new products and services, new brands, new digital experiences, new environments, even whole new companies. Our best work is done when we create solutions that remain fresh, inspired, and relevant. Using this approach, we work with our clients to create lasting, impactful projects that grow their businesses to new heights.
Industrial Design Firm
We prioritize functional industrial design that emphasizes intuitive creativity and calculated scientific decision-making. In our work, we take seriously our responsibility to create impactful products that define their markets and industries, and create new intellectual property. Our highly collaborative environment allows our designers to find best-in-class solutions that consider define product form and function, usability, physical ergonomics, marketing, brand development, sustainability, and sales. Our past industrial design projects have blended art and science into sustainable package design, medical devices, water filtration, toys, and more. Our picture of the world has great design everywhere and for everyone, and we are driven by our mission of creating impactful solutions that are both financially successful and address the most pressing social issues of our time.
Research Design
In most cases, designers are not the consumers and without deeper understanding and insights into people’s behavior and psychological patterns, RKS designs would be unable to create long and lasting benefits over many years. The foundation of this success comes from insights into people, their needs, their aspirations, their challenges, how they work, live and play, and the interior and social architecture of their lives. We use the picture developed from this ethnographic research as the basis of designs. Our team has years of experience designing, executing, and transferring data from our ethnographies to award-winning designs.
Strategy Design
Strategy is a design competency that links brand, product, and market. Using our advanced psycho-aesthetic framework we design strategies for businesses, products, and services that are relative, scalable, and adaptive. Our designers use our psycho-aesthetic approach, to create three types of strategy. Relative strategy that confronts the existence of competing companies and products to find the right white-space. Scalable strategy that looks ahead to the future of a business and industry. Adaptive strategy that changes a strategy the context of new information. A successful business, product, or service needs to consider all three.
Brand Design
Today, most industries and companies find themselves competing on brand. Brands fundamentally create trust, through honest emotional connections. These types of emotional connections are priority one for business leaders engaged in strategy, innovation, and design processes. Though we know brand must resonate emotionally, observing this phenomenon is much easier than creating it. Most agencies focus on how a brand makes people feel - we focus on how people want to feel and how a brand makes people feel about themselves. As designers we develop brands based on this understanding of how people see the world, resulting in our ability to empathize with them and their perceptions. As a brand design firm and agency we define and understand the attributes, benefits, values, and personality of a product, service, or company. In developing brand identity we also consider brand personality, awareness, recognition, and recall. Our work researches deep into name, logo, tagline, graphics, shapes, colors, sounds, scents, tastes, and even movements to create long-lasting emotional connections and differentiation.
Digital Design and Development
We used our advanced design thinking methodology to design, build, and validate your ideas into human-centered digital experiences. As the barrier to entry for digital products lowers with the cost of engineering design has become more important. We use our psycho-aesthetic approach to design user experiences and user interfaces that both solve user needs, and resonate with the user on an emotional level, turning them into product heroes. At the same time, we use the latest tools: augmented reality SDKs, AI based facial tracking and body tracking/scanning, natural language processing with Amazon Lex, blockchain technologies including smart contracts, decentralized security and privacy frameworks, machine machine learning algorithms and deep learning with TensorFlow and sci-kit, video and Image processing, HIPAA compliance and attestation, on device hardware integration, IoT and beacon technologies, and 3D imaging using OpenGL.