Over the past 30 years, Thousand Oaks-based RKS Design has proved it knows how to design stuff.

It’s won nearly every award in the industrial design world. It’s helped turn around troubled companies. A rethinking of the controls on Amana’s washing machines, for example, added about 30 cents in costs but helped swing the appliance maker to $20 million in profits and an acquisition by Maytag.

So when it came time for Deepa Prahalad, the firm’s head of global business strategy, and founder and CEO Ravi Sawhney to write a business text, they set their sights high. They redesigned the design process itself.

“Predictable Magic” lays out the firm’s “psycho-aesthetics” model for the design process. The idea is that while a great design is magic, the path to a great design shouldn’t be a mystery.

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