YVES Béhar

When Swiss-born, award-winning designer Yves Béhar agreed to design the latest work chair for Herman Miller, the Golden Gate Bridge in his adopted city of San Francisco was an inspiration. But while he has embraced California, he says it is only one part of his design personality

Industrial designer Yves Béhar has just completed what he calls the most important project of his career.

With a body of work that includes award-winning products for Apple, Coca- Cola and Swarovski, it’s safe to say he probably feels that way about everything he takes on, from big-budget corporate work to ‘for-cost’ civic initiatives such as One Laptop per Child. But, as the founder of San Francisco-based industrial design and branding firm Fuseproject explains, designing Herman Miller’s new work chair SAYL was a milestone.

‘A work chair is, in my opinion, the toughest kind of project one can do,’ says Béhar. ‘It is so complex, so demanding, and there’s been so much done in that area. The really good work chairs push the boundaries of technology and they symbolise and epitomise their eras.’

Originally from Lausanne in Switzerland, Béhar now looks every inch the laid back, sun-bleached Californian. With his tousled hair and breezy manner he has a passing resemblance to the actor Owen Wilson, and watching him address a press junket at the Design Museum in London to launch a sustainable packaging system he designed for Puma, he’s every bit as effortlessly charismatic.

After studying art and design at his local college in Switzerland, Béhar attended the Art Center College of Design, first at the Montreux campus, then in Pasadena. He moved to San Francisco in 1993, a time he describes as ‘a moment of immense technological innovation’.

‘Those innovations were a part of everyday culture here and became an additional tool-set for my work as a designer,’ he says. After a few years in Silicon Valley, designing computers first for Lunar then for Frog, he founded Fuseproject in 1999. Despite being a relatively small company (40 employees at last count) it earns more than its fair share of design awards, including the National Design Award.

Béhar may have fully embraced California, but he credits much of his design ethos to growing up in Switzerland with a Turkish father and East German mother; ‘I have a triad personality,’ he has said. ‘There’s the warmer, expressive, story-telling culture of Turkey combined with an ethic of quality that comes from Switzerland, and the California tech-causal culture mixed in.’

Styling is not Béhar’s thing. He talks about designing ‘from the ground up’, stripping concepts down to their essence and reimagining them through the eyes of the consumer.

The $100 Laptop, for example, is a masterpiece of design. Created for the One Laptop per Child initiative, the XO and XOXO laptops were designed to give children in developing countries access to education, information, and communication.

Approximately the size of a textbook and lighter than a lunchbox, the laptops are drop proof, splash proof and dust proof. They look great, and, much more importantly, they make a real difference to people’s lives.

Béhar and Fuseproject had worked with Herman Miller before on the LEAF LED lamp, a sustainable product that offers users a choice between a warm mood light and a cooler work light. But Béhar hadn’t felt the time was right to take on the work chair until now.

‘I honestly wanted to be ready,’ says Béhar. ‘People ask me all the time why I haven’t designed a chair and I’m always saying, well, it’s sort of a project that you either want to take on early or late in your career. You have to be ready; I practiced for more than 15 years before I felt like I was ready.’

It may have taken Béhar a long time to work up to it, but the actual design process of SAYL was, especially by Herman Miller’s standards, remarkably fast. Where the company’s last task chair, Embody, took six years, SAYL took less than three. It is also much cheaper and uses far fewer parts and less material. Embody was launched at Orgatec in 2008, a few months before the global banking crisis and, despite offering unparalleled levels of comfort and support, it soon seemed to belong to a different era.

‘It felt like now was the right time for me to design a work chair, for a couple of reasons,’ says Béhar. ‘One is that Herman Miller was interested in the notion of dematerialisation, of optimising the use of materials and simplifying the design, which leads to a lower carbon footprint; the other is that I’m interested in the possibility of making products more affordable and attainable.’ At around $400 – less than half the price of Herman Miller’s Aeron and Embody chairs – SAYL is certainly attainable, and its design is all the more remarkable for it. ‘Most chairs at this price are really just a kit of parts,’ says Béhar, ‘but … the whole point of this product was about reinventing and recreating something that really espouses the 21st-century notions of using safe materials and designing for the environment. As I always say, every molecule has to work harder; even the smallest piece of material has to do more for it to be more efficient.’

The inspiration for his chair’s back came from the Golden Gate Bridge, which Béhar sees every day. ‘That was an early inspiration,’ he says, ‘to look at the ways in which cable systems support incredible loads. So we have single tower with multiple attachment points, then we have an arch-span, that functions basically the way a bridge does as far as creating tension and supporting tension.’

And it’s not just the back of the chair that’s innovative. ‘The back is probably the most overt and visible in terms of what you see, but there’s a lot of innovation in the seat, in the tilt mechanism, in the way the chair moves and in the undercarriage. There is a lot of innovation in the base as well. The base looks very light and very small, but it has a partially invisible structure as well. So every part has been innovated,’ he says.

If you know anything about Yves Béhar, you’ll know that sustainability is central to his work. He has stated that without being sustainable, a product cannot be beautiful. In 2004 Béhar met the architect, designer and author William McDonough, who, along with chemist and academic Michael Braungart founded the Cradle to Cradle scheme of environmental certification.

The meeting was to have a profound effect on the way Béhar works. ‘To me, Cradle to Cradle is one of the most fantastic tools that we’re going to be able to use,’ he says. ‘Sustainability is probably the best way to reinvent the way we make and sell products. We are going to have these incredible opportunities to redesign things from the ground up.

‘It’s something I’ve tried, succeeded and failed at,’ he says,’ but I’m always learning.’



This article was first published in fx Magazine.








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