Meet the Man with the Midas Touch
Yves Béhar sits in the sunlit conference room of his San Francisco design agency Fuseproject, a massive whiteboard behind him. On the table in front of him is a leather-bound sketchbook, its pages a crazy quilt of random notes, rough sketches and other embryonic concepts, all visible to anyone within proximity. Some design superstars might guard their ideas and insights like they were state secrets, but not Béhar. Fuseproject, it seems, is just one big open book.
"Nothing is secret here," the mop-topped designer says, his voice betraying the faintest trace of his native French. "The walls are covered with work that's in progress, which allows senior and junior people from different practices to see everything that's going on. There are no hierarchical barriers or layers. You have the constant pulse of the work we're doing."
The Fuseproject pulse beats within some of the most cutting-edge product designs to emerge from Silicon Valley in the post-Apple era. Fifteen years after Béhar founded the firm, its résumé encompasses signature projects like the SodaStream Source home soda machine, the One Laptop per Child computer and the Jambox wireless speaker, alongside work for brands like Herman Miller, GE and Prada. Béhar's future-forward yet profoundly human ethos is now synonymous with the fast-evolving face of consumer technology, and his efforts have earned more than 200 awards, including a prestigious National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.
