the map village street editors

As children, our imaginations are swept away by the magic of storytelling. Mystical worlds and fanciful characters occupy our minds as we spend our days enraptured by the stories we are told and those we create ourselves. In the magic of childhood imagination, nothing is impossible. But then, as we grow into adults and common sense and practicality begin to dominate our headspace, the barriers of impossibility loom higher in our consciousness. In the field of design, we are so often told that things aren’t possible or practical. But for Swiss-born industrial designer Yves Behar, the secret to good design is in not losing that childhood imagination. In fact, Yves and his San Francisco-based design agency, fuseproject, have made a career from creating objects – such as the $100 Laptop and the Jawbone headset – that tell incredible stories and make the impossible possible.

Design was not always at the forefront of Yves Behar’s mind. Rather, it was the magic of storytelling that first fuelled his imagination. At first he dreamed of becoming a writer, but Yves soon discovered that it was possible to tell stories through objects using the language of design. “It’s bringing all the little pieces together into a very clear narrative; a very clear story,” Yves explains. “The experience has to have surprises – like a story does – and it has to have a beginning and an end. It’s about the designer integrating all the pieces of a puzzle.”

Yves first recalls becoming aware of the power of story whilst still a toddler crawling around his parents’ house in his native country of Switzerland. It was the scenes depicted on the Turkish carpets that lined the floors of his childhood abode that first piqued his interest. From tender love scenes to tableaux of epic battles, the intricate tales woven into these carpets filled the young Yves with a glorious sense of wonder and a firm belief that objects could truly tell stories. Carrying this belief with him through childhood, he designed his first object at age 16 – an exceptionally dangerous hybrid of a wind-surfing board and skis, which he used to skim across frozen lakes – and soon realised that industrial design was his calling.

Upon finishing design school in the early nineties, Yves became enraptured with the technological evolution occurring in Silicon Valley and the fact that the computer was entering the everyday home. Fascinated by the possibilities that were presented by the need to adapt the computer in order for this to happen, Yves found a job at a Silicon Valley design consultancy that was exploring such concepts. As a young designer at the firm, Yves constantly questioned (albeit naively, he now admits) every element of the computer’s design and its relevance to the user. He soon realised that the designers on the project were employed not to comment on the product’s functionality, but to merely make its exterior ‘pretty’. Determined not to become a “stylist” but rather to be part of creating the entire human experience, Yves left the consultancy to pursue his childhood dream of creating objects that tell stories. Moving to San Francisco, in 1999 he set the foundations of his own design agency, fuseproject.

In layman’s terms, fuseproject is a design, strategy and branding agency. In Yves’ terms, it’s a place where dreams are made. Here, he and his group of 30-or-so designers research, build and produce products, taking them from a mere concept inside someone’s imagination to become a tangible and functional product in everyday reality.

There’s a lot of power in pessimism, Yves points out, and the media takes great advantage of that power, but fuseproject operates largely in an environment of optimism. That is, they look optimistically towards the future and the changes it will bring. Whether it’s social change, civic change or technological change, Yves and his colleagues work together to make what is impossible in the present become possible in the future.

Over the past eight years, fuseproject has created some of the most iconic and coveted objects of the modern day – from the Leaf lamp, to the $100 Laptop and the Jawbone headset – and continues to “look around corners” to solve design problems of the future.

Yves’ sense of childhood wonder has continued to fuel his imagination well into his adult life and it is a beloved cartoon from his childhood, Barbapapa (the story of a family of blobbish shape-shifting creatures trying to fit in amongst human society) that still acts as a great inspiration for his design. The Barbapapas, he says, are a great example of transformation and how something can be adapted for different uses – to solve problems, to have fun, and to think of things from an entirely different perspective. And it’s the perfect description of the way fuseproject’s designers work. “We work in an optimistic space but we’re steeped in technical realities,” Yves fondly describes of his design agency, adding that his designers operate around two central themes: the experience of human emotion and the democratisation of design.

“These days our lives are about change and transformation and work and home life are coming into the one place,” he explains. “This means the products that we use have to have the ability to adapt, change and transform and to match the kind of lives and emotions that we’re in at that particular point.”

The Leaf lamp designed for Herman Miller, a product five years in the making, was conceived for its ability to create a unique experience with light. The lamp’s dramatic sculptural elements that allow it to be moulded into different shapes immediately make it a coveted design object. But, above this, what Yves and his designers hoped to achieve was the ability to alter the colour and tone of the light that was emitted. Mixing a variety of LEDs, the lamp’s light changes from warm to cool with a mere touch of the user’s fingertips, allowing it to adjust to the desired mood or ambience of a space. This magical tactile interaction with a product, which Yves refers to as “technology with humanity,” is an ingredient that is essential to all of his creations.

A perfect example of ‘technology with humanity’ in full flight, is fuseproject’s $100 Laptop designed for Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC aims to provide low-cost, connected laptops to millions of children in developing countries in order to give them the invaluable gift of collaborative, self-empowered learning. When Nicholas first approached him to design the laptop, Yves admits to becoming overwhelmed with emotion at being given the opportunity to drive such an important project. Drawing on this intense emotion, he etched a poem expressing the fundamental ideas that he felt were woven throughout the concept:

“Plant an idea,
Seed learning,
Grow a mind,
Mind the world,
Share.”
The word ‘share’, Yves points out, refers not only to the children’s ability to share information with the rest of the world via the laptops, but also to share with each other. The laptop’s bunny-like WiFi antennae allow
children within a 750-metre radius to connect with each other, share their knowledge and learn together. This ‘mesh network’ allows children to draw pictures together, to send each other messages and to even speak with each other in order to share their budding ideas. In cultures where a basic telephone is a rare luxury, such connectivity – which the Western world takes for granted – is life changing. For those children whose homes do not have electricity, the laptops can also be powered by a yo-yo-like attachment that uses human effort to generate power. The $100 Laptop is now used by millions of children in developing countries throughout the world, including Mongolia, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina, empowering the generations of the future to help themselves.

Bringing such a humanistic spirit to design is what Yves finds most rewarding and it is this that continues
to drive him as he explores the infinite number of stories that still remain untold. Bridging the gap between product design and human experience – redefining the values of design – he says, has the potential to change the world. And, for him, this is the true but simple essence of design: “Designers have the responsibility to show the world the way we want it to be – to imagine things moving forward and to move beyond the status quo.”

By Mikki Brammer