Yves Behar: Why California is the true home of American innovation | CNN

Courtesy Waymo

This week, the Design Museum in London opens "California: Designing Freedom." Scroll through the gallery for a preview from the exhibition's curator Brendan Mcgetrick.

"This is from Waymo, a subsidiary of Google. It's the first fully self-driving car, if you look at it you'll see it has no steering wheel or peddles or anything. You just get inside, press the button and it drives. It has sensors all over it, which allow it to see the road and process all the information it needs to drive. This prototype has never been seen before in the UK."

Courtesy Snap Inc, Los Angeles

"These are basically a camera embedded in glasses which allows you to make short videos which you can automatically upload to Snapchat. It makes it a natural part of your life as opposed to something you are choosing to do. We are presenting it as the next chapter in social media and sharing."

Courtesy Facebook

"It's a map of the world that isn't defined by geography or politics but by connections on Facebook."

Courtesy The ODIN

"This was created by a company called The Odin, they are a start-up that are trying to help kick-start DIY genetic engineering and bio-hacking. This kit is a very cheap, basic kit which you can buy and create a little lab in your garage. Why it matters in California is because things that are either developed in the military or big companies and are very expensive, these products, however, have been translated into much cheaper, available versions and then spread into society."

Courtesy Mark McCloud/Institute of Illegal Images

"This is blotter paper dipped in LSD and then distributed in small tabs. It comes from Mark McCloud who has designed and owns a big archive of blotter paper art. It's interesting to us because it represents LSD culture, which was enormously influential in the 1960s. LSD played a big role in the early development in computers. A lot of early innovators in computing were taking LSD to imagine new ways in which computers could change the world."

Courtesy Sunset Boulevard/Corbis /Getty Images

"This is the Captain America Motorcycle designed by Ben Harvey and Clifford Vaughn -- two motorcycle customization people working during the 1960s in LA. They made the bike for Easy Rider and Peter Fonda (left.) We have a replica of the bike in the show as the original was destroyed in the movie."

Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

"This is an example of the pattern drawings that were submitted by Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster was the architect and visionary of the Geodesic Dome, one of the things that became very popular with the back-to-land commune movement. After the summer of love in San Francisco a lot of the hippy communities moved to the desert, to the forest and all over America. The Geodesic dome was their preferred form of architecture and home, partly because it was easy to build out of materials, but also because it represented a new society, a networked society of pieces coming together joined through these links."

Artist: Shepard Fairey / Photographer: Ridwan Adhami / via amplifier foundation

"This is part of a series of posters Shepard Fairey made ahead of Trump's inauguration. The posters are positive affirmations of Muslim, Latina and Native American women. What is interesting about it for us is that Fairey made them freely available to download, share and print because he wanted them to be as widely available as possible. So, around the time when protests were erupting as Trump proposed his ban on immigration, loads of people were carrying round these posters. It's using digital distribution to spread a work."

Courtesy Free Speech Movement Archives, Berkeley

"The origin of the picture is unknown, it's an artifact of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) which is one of the earliest civil rights movements that originated at the University of California, Berkley. The movement used punch cards, an artifact of early computing, to make the point that the use of computers is turning people into data and turning universities into machines. They were using the materials of technology to make an argument against technology."

Courtesy Jesse Kaczmarek/The Rivalry

"This was created by Google in the Google Material Design Department. What's interesting is that 'Material' is the name of the platform they have developed which provides a single language for all of their apps. If you want to build a new app or a new product for Google then you use this 'Material' design language. Even though it's a digital product, they use physical models to develop it because they want to ensure they are using shadows, layering and things we associate with the physical world."

Editor’s Note: Yves Behar is the award-winning CEO and co-founder of Fuseproject, a design and branding firm based in San Francisco and New York. Behar’s works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, and he is a frequent speaker on design, sustainability and business topics.

CNN —

If you live in northern California or San Francisco, you can understand why our culture fosters innovation. “Traditional” is an obscenity. Instead, there is an eagerness to be first: the first to try a new experience, the first to buy from a new company or to test a new piece of technology.

Yves Behar

People here love new ideas, and they are not shy about discussing them. A positive response to a new idea from an engineer, a venture capitalist, or just anyone listening, is often enough to motivate someone to take that next step. Negative feedback, another important part of dialogue, keeps the wheels of entrepreneurship spinning. It’s all about participation and contribution: bring something and learn something.

Having grown up in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Bay Area’s progressive spirit came as a shock when I arrived in San Francisco in my early 20s.

As a teen, I was already immersed in the maker’s movement – though at the time, making your own unique clothes, posters and furniture was called “punk.” Quality design schools were hard to come by, but I was fortunate that Art Center College of Design, the famed Pasadena design school, had opened a Swiss branch.

Courtesy Fuseproject

Mini Jambox wireless speaker, designed by Fuseproject for Jawbone

After a transferring to and graduating from the California campus, I was fortunate to find employment in my favorite city, San Francisco. I loved that the city thrived in its own weirdness, and it seemed more people saw the world like I did.

In the mid-90s, the worlds of technology and design had not yet collided, and while computers were only beginning to enter the home, it was clearly only a matter of time before technology entered our everyday lives.

While designing computers with the likes of Apple and Hewlett-Packard, I also became versed in technology, software, mass-manufacturing and user-experience. Progressively, my design practice started to integrate every element of design and technology. In 1999 I named my agency Fuseproject, as I believe that to deliver complete experiences, design needs to fuse all the practices of design into a singular and cohesive idea.

Courtesy Fuseproject

Kodak Super 8 camera, designed by Yves Behar

Flash forward more than 25 years, and we are still only seeing a glimpse of how design can shape our world with technology as a tool. While my studio still works on projects like furniture and fashion, our passion is in creating the firsts that people crave – like Jambox, the first Bluetooth speakers and Superflex, the first powered clothing line, to name a few.

Our team members, clients and partners originate from around the world. Like us, they see design as a way to accelerate the adoption of new ideas. Whether we are looking for a new product, or transforming an existing industry, our aim is to always solve for a global human experience.

At the end of the day, I don’t think of myself as a California designer. Good design is without time or place. Good design improves our lives, no matter who we are and where we live.

Courtesy Fuseproject

Snoo self-rocking crib, designed by Yves Behar

Today, the multicultural and multidisciplinary approach to creating change is everywhere, from my hometown of Lausanne, with its own thriving start-up scene, to East Africa and South Asia, where Fuseproject’s Spring start-up accelerator helps groom new entrepreneurs.

What California offers (aside from better surfing than London or Lausanne) is constant inspiration, a culture of innovation, and a healthy competitive energy to push society to its best future.

“California: Designing Freedom” is on at the Design Museum in London from May 24 to Oct. 15, 2017.