Béhar didn't set out to be the agent provocateur of American design. A native of Lausanne, Switzerland, he is the oldest of three boys born to a Turkish father and an East German mother who had crawled through a Berlin subway tunnel to the West. As a child, he was a bit of a misfit, an artful dreamer who eventually discovered that he enjoyed inventing things (including a lethal-sounding skateboard-windsurfer for frozen lakes). At age 19, Béhar shocked his family when, despite having passed his university entrance exams, he opted to attend a little art school in a three- bedroom apartment where high-school dropouts and middle-aged people learned to draw. It was not a clear path to greatness. But Béhar eventually got himself into the Art Center College of Design, first at the Montreux campus, then, in 1990, in Pasadena. He never looked back.
Béhar's Turco-Swiss roots have largely given way to something quintessentially Californian. He named his baby Sky. And his mission at fuseproject definitely has a whiff of the lotus about it. First, Béhar says, he wants to be a futurist, optimistic about the possibilities of new technology. Second, he's a humanist, in that his designs seek to put the human experience first. And, finally, he's a committed naturalist, promoting sustainable ways of living and consuming. That fusion--of technology with humanity; of brand and story; of all aspects of design, from product to advertising to online to point of purchase to user experience--is his central message to new clients. "We have one foot in the consumer's space and one foot in our client's space," he's fond of saying, "so we can act as the bridge, or the glue."
His holistic view of design is rare in the business world. "The simplest definition of design," Béhar says, "is how you treat your customer. If you acknowledge their intelligence, and treat them well from an environmental, emotional, and aesthetic standpoint, you're probably doing good design." By that standard, he says, few CEOs come close. "They just don't know how hard it is," he says, "and what it will take on their part. There's pain in transformation, pain when you have to do things differently." Most execs hope skillful marketing will make up for design shortfalls, or that word of mouth around an occasional well-conceived product will float the rest of their wares. Such rosy thinking overlooks the tensions that arise when design gets factored into a big business. "Marketing people are incented to come up with great ideas," says Mitch Pergola, fuseproject's vice president and general manager. "Engineers are incented to drive out costs." To resolve those conflicts, somebody at the top has to make the Solomonic calls. "If you want to be design-driven," Béhar says, "the question is, Who's driving?"
Steven Kroeter, president of Archetype Associates, a consulting firm specializing in "design asset management," examined the backgrounds of 368 board members of the 30 Dow Jones Industrials and discovered only one--Steve Jobs, at Disney--with a design background. "It doesn't appear that design has yet evolved into an area of expertise that companies feel compelled to recruit for on their boards," he says. "Whether this is because design is only skin-deep in the U.S. business world or because it's still just too early in the process, only time will tell."
It's no accident that the design people getting traction in their organizations, among them Butler at Coke, Hacker at J&J, Claudia Kotchka at P&G, and Jonathan Ive at Apple, have backing at the top. Designers, for their part, also have a responsibility in this process: to understand the fundamental challenges of each business, and to work within those constraints. "To change the machines to make a product that's been made a certain way for, say, 30 years, could cost a billion dollars," says Pergola. "If you shoot the moon, but eight months into the project you discover that you need to build a factory on the moon to make the thing we've designed, it ain't a success."
Fuseproject's headquarters in San Francisco are surprisingly low-key for such a high-profile firm. Tucked between the Mexican consulate and a vacant lot on a deserted stretch of Folsom Street, the bamboo-shrouded entrance is easy to miss. A small brown rat scurries across the courtyard.
Inside, however, the office is unmistakably a designer's, with workstations ranged tightly around long, white oval tables. Béhar sits at the end of one, in a messy space piled high with books, magazines, file folders, and sketchbooks.
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
February 23, 2009 at 5:24pm by Eli Shapiro
That story is very inspirational to hear, mostly because off the success Yves has had so far, his age, and the fact that he didnt go to a traditional art school at first. When someone like that is able to accomplish his business goals while simultaneously telling his clients how it is really says something about how innovation comes about; from the people who had an outsider's perspective to start with. It has gotten to the point that I think traditional educational programs in many fields are more of a hindrance than a help for creative thinking and design.
November 21, 2009 at 5:03pm by jennifer park
Whenever i see the post like your's i feel that there are still helpful people who share information for the help of others, it must be helpful for other's. thanx and good job.
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