The Decade’s Best Product Designs

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]!”

In Asia alone, One Laptop Per Child donated the following:
Afghanistan (11,000 laptops received from G1G1 program)
Cambodia (3,200 laptops received from G1G1 program)
Mongolia (10,000 laptops received from G1G1 program)

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. His five favorite industrial designs from the last decade are the following: