Yves Béhar was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1967. He studied design in Lausanne in before attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, graduating in 1991 with a Bachelors of Industrial Design. In the early 1990s, he worked in California’s Silicon valley, taking on tech design projects for major clients like Apple Inc.
Upon researching Yves Béhar, I’ve come to realise that, even without knowing it, his designs have permeated into my daily life. I own a Jawbone Jambox mini, which is a portable wireless speaker.
“The design explorations for Mini Jambox started with a blank sheet and the idea to completely re-invent the wireless speaker, as we knew it. “It’s a strange moment when everyone loves your last product, and yet you realise the next one will have to be conceived and re-invented as if we were designing it for the first time,” says Yves Behar, CCO of Jawbone.”
“The Jawbone design language has always pursued minimal construction and geometry, made personal through the integral use of relief textures that are both personal and tactile. On Mini, we are pushing the boundary of rough and fast CNC, typically used to machine mechanical internal details. We flip the use of this usually hidden process, employing it externally to reveal beautiful capabilities for textures. We used large CNC cutting bits programmed to sculpt a few marks in the aluminium at high speed; the resulting intersections create new unexpected patterns.”
Realising these possibilities excites me as a product designer to be, because I realise that I am privy to knowledge and methods that prominent designers like Yves Béhar utilise. I also begin to understand the thought processes that are involved in the design, and that with some ingenuity we can create as well.
For a while I perceived that finding achievement and recognition as a product designer seemed lofty and somewhat unattainable, and that few are as fortunate. It isn’t easy, and I realise that a certain amount of dedication, resilience and a dash of luck is needed, but it’s not impossible.