BREAKING IN: Next Up: Yves Behar

Next Up: Yves Behar

Yves Behar is a design entrepreneur who believes that holistic product, digital, and brand design are cornerstones of any business. He is the founder and CEO of fuseproject, a design and branding firm he established in 1999. He is also Chief Creative Officer at Jawbone, where for the last 11 years his products, brand and communications work has helped the company become a leader in wearable and audio consumer electronics. Jawbone won a 2010 IDSA Design of the Decade Award. Behar is also the Creative Co-Founder of OUYA, an open sourced gaming platform, and is Co-founder of start-up August, a next generation home entry system.

Behar believes that design should be a force for positive social and environmental change. He is well known for his humanitarian work on projects such as One Laptop Per Child, which has given 2.5 million laptop to children in developing countries, and See Better to Learn Better which distributes free corrective eyewear to schoolchildren in Mexico and California. For each of these he was honored with the INDEX award, making him the only designer to have received the award twice.

His other collaborations with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, GE, Puma, PayPal, SodaStream, Samsung, Issey Miyake, Prada, Nivea and many others have received international acclaim. Behar’s works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago. Behar is a frequent speaker on design, sustainability and business topics; he has given talks at TED, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the Clinton Global Initiative. Behar is currently the artist trustee of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has garnered over 200 awards, and was named a Top 25 Visionary by TIME Magazine.