On a sunny weekend afternoon up on the northern California coast, a trio of school-age children clustered around Yves Béhar, the 40-year-old industrial designer and founder of San Francisco's trailblazing fuseproject studio. They had just wandered into the grassy expanse of Béhar's backyard, which tumbles down a precipitous bluff straight into the Pacific Ocean. The kids—neighbors, looking for something to do on a lazy Saturday—immediately descended upon a curious lime-green-and-white object that Béhar held in his hands. It looked suspiciously like a three-quarter-size MacBook, but one engineered with enough appeal, whimsy, and joy to suggest something out of the workshop of Sid and Marty Krofft. It was, in fact, a laptop, and as this impromptu preteen test audience spun through its various features—with outbursts of "Cool!" and "Whoa!"—it became clear that, in addition to the ingeniously tot-friendly packaging, this was a serious machine.
The $100 laptop. (Photo: Courtesy of Fuseproject)
They were playing with the latest prototype of the XO laptop (so called for its eye-catching typographic logo), also known, most famously, as the $100 laptop, one of the most discussed and debated philanthropic and technological undertakings in years. It is also the latest in a string of game-changing projects flowing out of Béhar's modest 28-person studio, which he founded in 1999. This fall, thousands of XOs—whose development has been guided by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT's Media Lab since 2005 under the aegis of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)—at last shipped out to third-world countries as part of a massive, multibillion-dollar effort to get kids everywhere the kind of educational technology taken for granted in the United States.
"Design is not just million-dollar tables," Béhar said when the gang took off in search of new adventures. As the design world becomes increasingly gallery-and limited-edition-driven, Béhar—born to a Turkish father and East German mother in Lausanne, Switzerland—is something of a throwback to the era of Eliot Noyes and Raymond Loewy, guys who turned their expertise to everything from cars to gas station logos to locomotives and even, in the case of Loewy, Coke bottles. Béhar himself has been tapped by Coca-Cola to help reinvigorate its design culture, and his roster of clients includes Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Birkenstock, Mini Cooper, and Sony.
But there's nothing retro about Béhar's approach. "I'm a futurist," he says, "in the sense that I integrate new technologies into areas where they haven't been integrated before." Examples abound, from the astonishing Leaf lamp for Herman Miller, which looks like a twisted blade of grass and is one of the first task lights to harness the potential of LEDs, to the Aliph Jawbone, the noise-canceling Bluetooth earpiece chosen to be bundled with Apple's iPhone.
