Yves Béhar

Yves Béhar is a designer and entrepreneur who believes that integrated product, digital, and brand design are the cornerstones of any business. He is the founder and chief designer of fuseproject, an acclaimed industrial design firm, and co-founder of August Home, a leading provider of smart locks and smart home services. As a Plant Design Partner, Béhar strives to achieve inspired living environments that are as creatively designed as they are groundbreakingly functional, and to make them attainable for urban dwellers of the future.

For more than twenty years, Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental change. His humanitarian work includes the One Laptop Per Child, which has given 2.5 million laptops to children in developing countries, See Better to Learn Better, which distributes 500,000 free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico and California every year. For each of these he was honored with the INDEX Award, making him the only designer to have received the award twice. He also worked with the Bloomberg administration on the NYC Condom, and spearheaded SPRING, an accelerator supporting African and Asian entrepreneurs focused on social and economic change in East Africa and South Asia.

His collaborations with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, Movado, Samsung, Puma, Issey Miyake, Prada, SodaStream, Swarovski, Canal+, British Gas, Nivea, and many others have received international acclaim. He is widely recognized for products and experiences that establish new categories such as the One Laptop Per Child, the breakthrough Jambox wireless speaker, the first sleep and fitness tracker worn on the wrist (Jawbone UP), the smart baby sleeper SNOO, and the widely successful Herman Miller Sayl task chair.

Béhar's works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago. Béhar is a frequent speaker on design, sustainability, technology and entrepreneurship; he has given talks at TED, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the Clinton Global Initiative. Béhar was selected as the artist trustee of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has garnered over 300 awards, including the Design Miami/2015 Design Visionary Award, the London Design Museum’s Design of the Year, Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award, IDSA Design of the Decade Award, IDA Designer of the year and Conde Nast Traveler Designer of the Year. Béhar has been named a Top 25 Visionary by TIME Magazine and “Most Influential Industrial Designer in the World” by Forbes.