Yves Béhar was 14 when he began building furniture in his parents’ basement. “It was the punk era, so the notion that the amateur could make things without proper training was empowering,” recalls the Switzerland-reared CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Fuseproject. Before establishing his own industrial design firm in 1999, Béhar cut his teeth at Silicon Valley design stalwarts Frog and Lunar, which has since been acquired by McKinsey. Working with such visionary clients as Apple at a time when design was finding its voice as a business strategy “was incredible training and an awakening for me,” he says. With Fuseproject (what he calls a “big, scary jump into the unknown”), Béhar envisioned melding various design disciplines to fully bring big ideas to life, and he still maintains this mission. The company’s solutions for a spectrum of corporate behemoths, including Herman Miller, Nike, and L’Oréal, he explains, reflect how “the world of design changed from being iterative to companies believing in separating themselves from others with differentiation, new ideas, and new concepts.”
Unconventional Entrepreneur
A core pillar of Fuseproject is “to take longterm bets on startups we see as gamechangers,” Béhar points out. Such developments are possible because Fuseproject is propelled by a bifurcated business approach. Béhar brought in a business partner early on to manage the client side, so he and the firm’s current creative leaders could focus on designing and “continuing to do what we love,” he says. That means brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping with his team, which, he says, is the reason he gets up each morning. It also gives him time to devote to exciting side projects, such as cofounding coworking company Canopy and the key-free August Home Access System.
Activity zones at de Youngsters Studio explore color, composition, shape, form, and sculpture
Benevolent Technology
Growing up in a town near institutions like UNICEF and the Red Cross, Béhar viewed design early on “as an empathic profession—a way to address people’s needs.” Naturally, progress and social impact are intertwined in Fuseproject’s creations. Consider the human-centered SPRING accelerator, which supports businesses working to transform the lives of adolescent girls in East Africa and South Asia, or Moxie by Embodied, a playful, educational robot for children across the developmental ability spectrum. AI is likewise incorporated into ElliQ, a companion robot created with Intuition Robotics to engage aging adults, as well as Happiest Baby’s Snoo, the infant-soothing bassinet invented alongside pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp (a process that took five years) that so far counts more than 100 million hours of babies sleeping soundly. “It’s always interesting to me when a project like this changes the understanding of a human experience,” says Béhar.
Design in Uncertain Times
Whether it’s dreaming up the world’s first 3D-printed community with the nonprofit New Story Charity or designing Ori, the modular unit that maximizes microliving, Fuseproject invites users to reimagine a flexible concept of home. The arrival of its FORME Life, for instance, the full-length mirror that morphs into a body- and mind-strengthening personal gym, feels particularly welcome now. But it’s the soon-to-be-manufactured VOX, Fuseproject and technology startup CIONIC’s winning design for a quickly deployable ventilator in Massachusetts General Hospital’s CoVent-19 challenge, that expresses the firm’s timeliness, innovation, and purpose. Rightful intent, says Béhar, is “the definition of design.”
Slatted wood ceilings and black accents define coworking space Canopy Jackson in San Francisco
Photos by Justin Bruell, Joe Fletcher, and courtesy of Fuseproject
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2020 issue.
