Yves Béhar Releases First Retrospective Monograph – Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas
Thames & Hudson book chronicles twenty years of Behar’s product designs and entrepreneurship, highlighting more than sixty innovations spearheaded by him and his team at fuseproject
San Francisco, California (September 14, 2021) — Yves Béhar, the design entrepreneur known for founding San Francisco-based design and branding firm fuseproject in 1999, is pleased to announce the release of his first monograph, titled Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas.
Published by Thames & Hudson, the book celebrates more than twenty years of Béhar’s work at fuseproject, chronicling his design leadership and innovation across industries, particularly the areas of smart home technology, artificial intelligence and robotics, health and wellness, sustainability, and environments.
In narrating the evolution of fuseproject, the book reinforces Yves’ focus on social impact initiatives, along with his pioneering role in ushering design into venture businesses. Throughout his career, Béhar has used design to enrich the lives of those who have the least—who some in the business world have long considered unreachable. And through fuseproject’s venture program, Béhar has helped startup businesses leverage the power of great design to bring category-defining products to market.
Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas spotlights more than sixty impactful designs—from ElliQ, an empathetic robot companion designed for the needs of the elderly, to Proteus, an underwater version of the International Space Station. Featured clients and collaborators include Happiest Baby, Herman Miller, Samsung, Swarovski, Jawbone, SodaStream, and BMW, among others.
To uncover the breadth and depth of fuseproject’s archive, Béhar worked with Adam Fisher, a San Francisco-based journalist and the author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley. Adam interviewed Yves about each design, contextualizing the conversations in a unique narrative format that offers a hybrid of first-person and third-person storytelling. The resulting thematic sections—which are accompanied by text descriptions, sketches, and studio photography—further illuminate the evolution of each project and explore the following ideas:
Reducing addresses the need to minimize material consumption and spotlights the redesign of manmade objects for low-carbon living, including Puma’s shoebox and Nivea’s entire packaging system.
Sensing chronicles the evolution of fuseproject designs that employ technology as a sensing material—one that can feel, see, or learn, including the August WiFi Smart Lock, which senses when you are at your front door and unlocks it for you.
Transforming details how fuseproject has seized opportunities to reimagine objects stuck in time (by bringing vibrators to market with JimmyJane and eliminating traditional barriers to fitness with FORME Life, for example).
Giving recalls designs that have helped to tackle economic or environmental challenges, including Béhar’s recent collaboration with The Ocean Cleanup to design sunglasses 100% made from recovered ocean plastics.
Humanizing articulates how fuseproject has contributed to technical breakthroughs that preserve human values and support people through different phases of life, particularly through robot companions (Moxie by Embodied) and compassionate AI (Snoo by Happiest Baby).
Scaling looks at forward-thinking projects that combine design and technology in the service of a larger idea, such as Ori—a flexible and efficient robotics furniture system that transforms itself to accommodate a homeowner’s spatial needs.
“Finding our way to this novel storytelling format was, in and of itself, an iterative design process. But it was worth it, as this form is the one that we feel gets closest to communicating how design ideas are born, how they are explored, and how they grow into full-fledged products. It tells the stories with an emphasis on the arduous and often-humbling design process,” remarks Béhar.
Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas marks the first collaboration between Béhar and Thames & Hudson. It is available to order via W.W. Norton & Company, Amazon, and Bookshop.org, among other retailers.
ABOUT YVES BÉHAR
Yves Béhar is a global leader in design and the Founder and Chief Designer of San Francisco-based industrial design and brand development studio fuseproject. A successful entrepreneur, Béhar has co-founded new companies such as August Home, FORME Life, and CANOPY and has partnered with industry titans like Puma, Herman Miller, Swarovski, SodaStream, Nivea, and more.
Béhar's works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a frequent speaker on design, sustainability, technology and entrepreneurship; he has given talks at TED, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the Clinton Global Initiative.
Béhar was selected as the artist trustee of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has garnered over 300 awards, including the Design Miami/ 2015 Design Visionary Award, the London Design Museum’s Design of the Year, Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award, IDSA Design of the Decade Award, IDA Designer of the year and Conde Nast Traveller Designer of the Year. Yves Béhar was named a Top 25 Visionary by TIME Magazine, and was recently named “Most Influential Industrial Designer in the World” by Forbes.
ABOUT FUSEPROJECT
fuseproject is a multidisciplinary, first-in-category firm, built on Yves Béhar’s belief that integrated product, digital, and brand design are at the cornerstone of any business and that design can be a force for positive social and environmental change. The studio’s work spans from designing full environments to robotics, smart-home technology, and wellness equipment, as well as humanitarian and non-profit projects.
ABOUT THAMES & HUDSON
An independent, family-owned company, Thames & Hudson is one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books with over 2,000 titles in print. We publish high-quality books across all areas of visual creativity: the arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film and music, and also archaeology, history and popular culture. Our children’s books list is also expanding. Headquartered in London, we have a sister company in New York and subsidiary sales and distribution companies in Hong Kong and Paris. Today the group employs 150 staff in London and a further 65 around the world.