Yves Béhar is the founder of fuseproject, a San Francisco based design agency contributing to areas that include technology, furniture, sports, lifestyle and fashion. Béhar brings a humanistic approach to his work with the goal of creating projects that are deeply in-tune with the needs of a sustainable future, connected with human emotions and which enable self-expression. Examples of fuseproject’s diverse projects include the world’s first $100 “XO” laptop for Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, which aims to bring education and technology to the world’s poorest children. fuseproject is now working on the laptop’s successor, the “XOXO”. Other recent projects include a partnership with “Jawbone”, a leading edge mobile phone headset company; “LeCube”, a set top box for France’s premier digital TV brand Canal +; a recycling project for Coca Cola; a new identity and strategy for iGoogle’s home page; “MINI-Motion”, a new brand for BMW’s MINI Cooper; the LEAF light and other furniture projects for Herman Miller and the NYC Condom for the department of Health of the City of NY. Béhar was born in Switzerland and studied industrial design in Europe and the U.S. Fifteen years ago he moved to San Francisco at a moment of immense technological innovation; “those innovations were a part of everyday culture here and became an additional tool-set for my work as a designer,” Béhar says. He credits his design ethos in part to growing up in Switzerland with a Turkish father and East German mother; “I have a triad personality,” he explains. “There’s the warmer, expressive, story-telling culture of Turkey combined with an ethic of quality that comes from Switzerland, and the California tech-causal culture mixed in.” The combination of technological innovation and design, or the notion of design ‘from the inside out’ is a hallmark of Béhar’s work. “I see design less from a style standpoint than in terms of innovative experiences,” Béhar explains. fuseproject considers not just the outer shell, but the relevant functional purpose and emotional connection of the product itself. In addition to fuseproject’s commercial projects are many not for profit clients which underline Béhar’s core philosophy that, “Design is a real agent of change. We need to initiate an emphasis on the notion of ‘Design for Good’; we have a responsibility to the world around us.” Ironically, perhaps, it’s his work which has been developed purely for a developing world audience, the XO and the XOXO for OLPC, which has generated some of the most dramatic innovations in computer design in recent years. A laptop which has been designed to cost 100euros, which can withstand knocks and even be dropped, whose screen must stand up to intense daylight, whose keyboard has to cope with damp and dust, which should be light enough for a small child to carry on long walks to school, and whose appealing design is bright and playful, has all the qualities many consumers in the developed world would find immensely desirable, and yet which conventional manufacturers have barely considered until now. Yves Béhar’s innovative designs have garnered more than 150 awards and his work is in the permanent collections of museums including the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou, the MOMA, the Munich Museum of Applied Arts and the Chicago Art Institute. In 2009 Yves Béhar was the one of two industrial designers invited to speak at Davos.
