Yves Béhar has a message for corporate honchos: Trust your designers.  “Designers need to be trusted and [treated] as equals by CEOs,” says the Switzerland-born industrial designer. “Unless they’re elevated to a point where they are peers to people in marketing, good design will not happen.”  Mr. Béhar boasts a resume impressive enough for him to make such a claim. He began his career designing server computers and laptops for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Apple, and later founded fuseproject, a San Francisco-based industrial-design agency, where he’s worked on high-profile projects such as the Mission One electric motorcycle. Currently, he is focusing on the next generation of the One Laptop per Child Association’s XO laptop.  Designing the original $100 laptop for the One Laptop charity was one of the biggest challenges of his career, says Mr. Béhar. “We had to deliver a laptop in the right size and [capable of] the right performance at an affordable price. On top of that, the dollar lost 40% of its value [while we were building it]!”  A regular visitor to Asia—”We manufacture a lot and I work a lot here”—Mr. Béhar was recently in Singapore to launch the Sayl chair for Herman Miller. We asked him to pick his five favorite industrial designs from the last decade.  1. The iPhone and iPad: “For once, tech companies have found a way to really integrate software and hardware. Before that, they were tremendously lazy and products were based on specs and not on people. Apple forced everybody to move from a technical to human point-of-view. [The company] has changed the static mobile business and accelerated the rate of innovation globally because it abandons itself to the vision of its designers. That’s tremendously difficult for others to do.”  2. The Tesla Model S electric saloon car: “For showing us an exciting vision of the family electric car and for making a seven-seater interior that is roomy and incredibly practical.”  3. LED lighting: “Low-energy-consumption LED’s are revolutionizing lighting in every possible lighting application. With low energy consumption, and a long-lasting life, LEDs work well for [replacing] the everyday light bulb, as well as the office and industrial applications. [In the] future, [they will also power] street lights.”  4. 132 5. Issey Miyake fabric: “Issey Miyake’s latest origami-technical innovation and new brand shows that fashion can be part material and process invention, part playful concept and part poetic beauty. I consider Miyake’s work to be as much industrial design as it is fashion.”  5. The SIGG portable aluminum water bottle: “[It has] inspired millions to ditch the disposable plastic bottle for a lasting, fun and practical solution. We simply should stop indulging in the plastic water bottle because of the material and transportation waste associated to it, but until SIGG came along and made carrying refillable water bottles fun, functional and stylish, switching to refillable bottles was a lot harder.”  Get Scene in your inbox by subscribing to our daily newsletter.
Top industrial designer Yves Béhar (Mission One electric motorcyle, the One Laptop per Child Association's computer) names the decades top five product designs.