Quick Facts
Born:
May 9, 1967, Lausanne, Switzerland (age 57)

Yves Béhar (born May 9, 1967, Lausanne, Switzerland) is a Swiss-born industrial designer and founder of the design and branding firm Fuseproject. Béhar is widely known for his work on the XO and XO-3 laptops, which were created in partnership with American digital-media scientist Nicholas Negroponte and his nonprofit organization One Laptop per Child (OLPC).

Béhar studied design in Europe before attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In the early 1990s he worked in California’s Silicon Valley, taking on technology design projects for clients such as Apple Inc. He later broadened his interests to include furniture and apparel, and in 1999 he founded the San Francisco-based Fuseproject, which stressed the inseparability of brands and products. Through Fuseproject design ventures with such varied companies as furniture maker Herman Miller, computer software giant Microsoft, and soft-drink icon Coca-Cola, Béhar became known for a subtle minimalist style, the incorporation of experimental technologies, and the ease with which he crossed between disciplines and between different forms of media.

Many of Béhar’s creations captured the interest of business leaders and industrial designers alike. Some of his works were put on display in museums of modern art, including his original Jawbone Bluetooth headset for mobile devices (created for Aliph, Inc. [now Jawbone], where he was chief designer) and his Teflon-coated water-repellant cashmere windbreaker (designed for fashion house Lutz & Patmos). In the area of computer technology, his most innovative work was for OLPC, which he joined as chief designer in 2006. Although the production of a low-cost high-quality laptop for educational use in less-developed countries was heavily criticized, for reasons that were technological as well as political and social, Béhar and Negroponte were determined to create a product that appealed to children and was practical for the intended learning environment. Béhar focused primarily on the look and feel of the computer and the incorporation of green technology. He considered similar problems in his design of a collection of free customizable children’s eyeglasses for Mexico’s nonprofit project See Better to Learn Better. With these nonprofit efforts, Béhar drew attention to the social relevance of design and the ability of design to influence human emotion and experience.

computer chip. computer. Hand holding computer chip. Central processing unit (CPU). history and society, science and technology, microchip, microprocessor motherboard computer Circuit Board
Britannica Quiz
Computers and Technology Quiz

Béhar’s design for the XO-3 tablet, a rugged energy-efficient sub-$100 computer, was unveiled in 2012 as the next generation of computers for the OLPC project. Although the working tablet was criticized for not being as slim and sleek as prototype renderings had suggested it would be, it did boast 512 megabytes of RAM, a Wi-Fi antenna, a peel-off silicone protective covering, and an optional solar panel for recharging in sunlight—features that significantly improved its durability and utility. The XO-3 was the successor of the original, award-winning XO laptop, the cover of which Béhar had also designed. By the time the OLPC Foundation disbanded in 2014, XO laptops had been delivered to 3.5 million children.

In 2014 Béhar sold 75 percent of Fuseproject to BlueFocus, a Chinese conglomerate that gained full ownership in 2017, and he became CEO. Meanwhile, Béhar cofounded August (2012), a maker of smart locks and home security systems. Perhaps his most famous project of the decade, however, was the Snoo (2016). Billed as the world’s first smart crib, the Snoo integrated tasteful design with technology, using microphones, speakers, and sensors to rock babies to sleep when they began crying. Soon such museums as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, acquired the piece for their collections. In 2019 Béhar collaborated with a housing nonprofit and a building technology company to rapidly construct affordable housing for an undisclosed farming community in Latin America using 3D printing.

As the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic surged in 2020, Béhar responded to a call from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, for the rapid design and production of ventilators to address anticipated shortages. Fuseproject worked with a technology start-up to create the Vox ventilator, one of the finalists chosen to be built into working prototypes. Fuseproject’s innovative design was recognized by a number of prominent magazines, including Fast Company and Interior Design Magazine.

Béhar received numerous honours for his work, including two INDEX awards and the Condé Nast Traveller Innovation and Design award for Designer of the Year (2011). In 2021 he published a complete monograph of his work, Yves Béhar: Designing Ideas.

Are you a student?
Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.
Kara Rogers The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Britannica Chatbot logo

Britannica Chatbot

Chatbot answers are created from Britannica articles using AI. This is a beta feature. AI answers may contain errors. Please verify important information using Britannica articles. About Britannica AI.

industrial design, the design of mass-produced consumer products. Industrial designers, often trained as architects or other visual arts professionals, are usually part of a larger creative team. Their primary responsibility is to help produce manufactured items that not only work well but please the eye and, therefore, have a competitive advantage over similar products. The work of an industrial designer often relates to or includes graphic design, such as advertising and packaging, corporate imagery and branding, and interior design (also called interior architecture or environmental design), the arrangement of man-made spaces.

Origins of modern design: Germany and Europe

Industrial design is a largely 20th-century phenomenon. The first industrial designer is often considered to be German architect Peter Behrens, who was heavily influenced by the 19th-century English designer and poet William Morris and by the Arts and Crafts movement, with which Morris was closely associated. Beginning in 1907, Behrens was the artistic adviser for AEG (the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft, or Universal Electric Company), for which he designed not only industrial buildings but also small electrical appliances, from teakettles to fans. In addition, he determined the company’s corporate identity, packaging, and advertising. Behrens’s approach was an extension of what architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Karl Friedrich Schinkel long practiced: total control of a designed environment at all levels. Behrens, however, created designs for a corporate client, intent on selling a service and related goods to the public, rather than for a middle-class residential client or a royal patron, as in the cases of Wright and Schinkel, respectively.

Behrens was a leading member of the Deutscher Werkbund (founded in 1907), a society of artists, architects, and craftsmen akin to English arts-and-crafts societies. The Deutscher Werkbund catalyzed communication among German design professionals and sponsored major exhibitions, such as those in Cologne (1914) and Stuttgart (1927); the latter was the Weissenhofsiedlung, a renowned exhibition of model homes designed by Europe’s leading modern architects and the epitome of the International Style of minimalist architecture.

Behrens himself influenced many architect-designers of the next generation, including Walter Gropius, founder of Germany’s famed Bauhaus school of design, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who served as a later director of the school. Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Ger., the Bauhaus aimed to elevate and coordinate the design and production of crafts and industrial goods for a new postimperial age. Both Gropius and Mies designed buildings as well as smaller-scale objects. For instance, Gropius was the architect of the new Bauhaus building when the school moved to Dessau in 1925, but he also designed interiors of Adler automobiles (1930–33). The furnishings designed at the Bauhaus were characterized by the extensive use of bent metal, something that was developed with the assistance of the Junkers Aircraft Company in Dessau, a firm known for its early development of the all-metal airplane in 1918, at the end of World War I. Mies—who directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, when the Nazi Party came to national power and closed it—designed some renowned examples of steel-framed furniture, such as the MR chair (1927), the Barcelona chair (1929), and the Brno chair (1930). During the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, when he had few architectural commissions, Mies earned a living from the royalties of those furniture sales. The Bauhaus produced other icons of modern design, notably the sleek glassware and streamlined table lamps of Wilhelm Wagenfeld.

Beyond those designers specifically associated with the Bauhaus, other German architects of the time created high-profile designs; for instance, Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot created the interiors of the steamship Bremen (1929) and the airship Hindenburg (1931–35), and in the 1930s Gropius protégé Carl August Bembé designed motorboats for Maybach, a company that built internal-combustion engines for airplanes and boats and automobiles for the German car manufacturers Opel and Adler.

Early developments in industrial design were not, however, taking place solely in Germany. In the first decades of the 20th century, architects and designers in other countries were also creating distinctively designed consumer products. These include such items as the undulating Savoy vase (1936) by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, the avant-garde geometric porcelain teapots and cups (1923) by Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, the classic double-lever corkscrew (1930) by Italian designer Dominick Rosati, and the ubiquitous, highly flexible Anglepoise desk lamp (1932) by the British automotive engineer George Carwardine.

Britannica Chatbot logo

Britannica Chatbot

Chatbot answers are created from Britannica articles using AI. This is a beta feature. AI answers may contain errors. Please verify important information using Britannica articles. About Britannica AI.