When Béhar launched his studio almost 20 years ago, he was trying to get the business world to understand the value of design. He advocated that enterprises should empower designers to be involved in every aspect of their operations. Indeed, design has since been embraced by all corners of the corporate world, so much so that global strategy firms are gobbling up design shops, including Fuse, as Béhar and his employees call the firm: The Chinese conglomerate BlueFocus bought 75% of Fuse in 2014 for a reported $46.7 million and as of December 2017 owns it outright. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has gestated a generation of user-experience-focused unicorns. Airbnb (two cofounders attended RISD), Pinterest, and WeWork, to name just a few, are on the verge of going public, proving that design has become a crucial component in creating status quo–shattering private enterprises. Béhar, despite both his evangelism and his fame—he’s arguably the best-known working designer with the exception of Apple’s Jony Ive—has been associated with few success stories with this kind of cultural oomph. There’s August, which was acquired for an estimated $150 million last year, and 3-D printer Desktop Metal, which has been valued at $1 billion. Fuse has also done notable corporate work for SodaStream, Movado, Nivea, and Western Digital. He touts his work on the Snoo, a bassinet using AI and robotics. But Béhar has also contributed to some of tech’s notorious flops, from Juicero to Jawbone; he even designed the sheet-metal casing of Theranos’s Edison.
Here’s his TED talk from a decade ago
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