Yves Béhar

Born 1967 in Lausanne/Switzerland.

Yves Béhar works as an industrial designer and chairs the Industrial Design Department at California College of the Arts. He studied industrial design in Europe and the USA and holds a BS from the Art Center College of Design, California. Béhar is the founder of »fuseproject«, a San Francisco-based design and branding studio established in 1999. Among others, »fuseproject« designs products for brands such as Birkenstock, ERCO, BMW MINI, Nike, Microsoft, Herman Miller, Aliph Jawbone, and Danese. In 2005, Béhar created a massive chandelier for Swarovski, which was installed at JFK airport, New York.

With his work, Béhar pursues three creeds: being a futurist and showing optimism for new technologies, being a humanist in the sense of designing products primarily for the human experience, and being a naturalist by promoting sustainable ways of living and consuming.

Béhar designed the XO-1 laptop for the social welfare organization One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which supports the education of children in developing countries.

Yves Béhar has been given numerous awards, among others the Brit Insurance Design Award 2008 and the INDEX: AWARD 2007 for his work with OLPC, the Red Dot Design Award (2004-2008), the National Design Award for industrial design awarded by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York (2004), 19 IDEA/Business Week Gold Excellence Awards (2003-2008), several D&AD; Awards, and awards from ID Magazine (from 2002-2008).