Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas

Yves Béhar, Adam Fisher

The complete monograph of the work of Yves Béhar, the world’s leading product designer and design entrepreneur, prepared in close collaboration with the designer himself.

Since founding his studio, Fuseproject, in 1999, Yves Béhar has redefined the role of the designer, expanding his work to include both public-sector and entrepreneurial engagements. In doing so, Béhar has produced groundbreaking, award-winning designs that have had a positive impact on the well-being of people in developing countries and impoverished communities, creating everything from laptops and eyeglasses for children to stylish electronics. His clients have included MIT, BMW, Microsoft, Swarovski, and many more.

A comprehensive retrospective of Béhar’s twenty-year career, this book presents his work in thematic chapters—“Reducing,” “Sensing,” “Transforming,” “Giving,” “Humanizing,” and “Scaling”—and explores over sixty projects in detail through text descriptions, sketches, and exquisite studio photography. O ering thorough insight into the conception, process, and production of some of the most recognized pieces of contemporary design, Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas illuminates the designer’s particular fusion of creativity and commercial savvy, as well as his studio’s expertise in combining social responsibility and entrepreneurial acumen.

Reviews

It's a 350-plus-page wonder cabinet crammed with every kind of project, product, initiative, and environment imaginable. You can read it not only as a timeline of Béhar and his two decades with Fuseproject, but of 21st-century design in general, with its preoccupations laid out page by page, from tech to lifestyle to sustainability. The book is unusually conversational (the text is, in fact, a dialogue-like collaboration with the journalist Adam Fisher), an amiable and frank journey into the twists and turns of the design process.

— Mark Rozzo Vanity Fair

A comprehensive retrospective of [Béhar's] 20-year career… In many ways, this book can be understood as an exploration of what constitutes design in contemporary culture.

— Fast Company

Contributors

Yves Béhar

Author

Yves Béhar, Founder and CEO of fuseproject, is a designer and entrepreneur who believes that integrated product, brand and experience design are the cornerstones of any business. Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental change. His humanitarian work includes the One Laptop Per Child and See Better to Learn Better, which has distributed 6 million free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico for the last 10 years. He received the INDEX Award for these projects, making him the only designer to have received the award twice. Yves has also been at the forefront of entrepreneurial venture design, co-founding FORME Life, August, and Canopy, as well as partnering with numerous start-ups such as the Happiest Baby Snoo, Uber, Cobalt, Desktop Metal, Sweetgreen and many others. Other notable collaborations with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, Movado, Samsung, Puma, Issey Miyake, Prada, SodaStream, Nivea, The Ocean Cleanup and many others have also received international acclaim.

Adam Fisher

Author

Adam Fisher is a writer and journalist based in San Francisco. He is the author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley.