Yves Béhar

Yves Béhar is the founder of fuseproject, an integrated design firm dedicated to the development of the emotional experience of brands through storytelling. The firm's wide-ranging practice encompasses products, environments, graphics, packaging, apparel, and strategy in the realms of technology, sports, lifestyle, and fashion. Clients have included Birkenstock, Herman Miller, MINI, Nike, Microsoft, Hussein Chalayan, Swarovski, Toshiba, Sony, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Target, Magis, and the Coca-Cola Company.

Yves's unique perspective on design and story development has been recognized internationally in museums and competitions. He had two solo exhibitions of his work in 2004, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Musée de design et d'arts appliqués contemporains (MUDAC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He has received the prestigious National Design Award for industrial design, awarded by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. He has also received the Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) and awards from red dot, I.D. magazine, D&AD, and Industrie Forum Design Hannover.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum fur angewandte Kunst, Munich, and the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.

MINI, a division of the BMW Group, recently invited Yves to design a signature collection of lifestyle products under the MINI_motion name. He has also designed a new brand direction and two new lines of Birkenstock shoes—Footprints and Birki's—by adding his own experience and interest in recyclable technologies to Birkenstock's traditional look.

Prior to founding fuseproject in 1999, Yves was design leader at the Silicon Valley offices of frog design and Lunar Design, developing product identities for clients such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Silicon Graphics.