Revolutionary designer Yves Béhar was announced as 2020 Interior Design Show Guest of Honour. The show saw a combination of innovation and sustainable ideas at the forefront.
Photos by Perrier Jouet, IDS and Justin Buell
The 2020 Interior Design Show (IDS20) welcomed San Francisco-based Swiss designer, entrepreneur and humanitarianism Yves Béhar as this year’s International Guest of Honour. The show also saw multidisciplinary British designer Bethan Laura Wood as a keynote speaker, returning features and IDS Contract conference themes. IDS20, Canada’s largest contemporary design fair, took place between January 16-19, 2020 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Recognized for advocating the value of design in business, Yves Béhar is the founder and chief designer of fuseproject, a multidisciplinary industrial design and branding firm; co-founder of August Home, the leading provider of smart locks and smart home services; and co-founder of Canopy, a boutique co-working enterprise.
Béhar believes that integrated product, digital, experience design and brand design are the cornerstones of any business. He has collaborated with renowned partners such as Herman Miller, Movado, Samsung, Puma, Issey Miyake, Prada, SodaStream, Swarovski, Canal+, Nivea and many others, receiving international acclaim.
Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental change. His humanitarian work includes One Laptop Per Child, which has given 2.5 million laptops to children in developing countries and See Better to Learn Better, which distributes 500,000 free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico and California every year. For each of these, he was honoured with the INDEX Award, making him the only designer to receive the award twice.
Béhar’s works are included in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has garnered over 300 awards, including the Design Miami/2015 Design Visionary Award, the London Design Museum’s Design of the Year, Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award, IDSA Design of the Decade Award, IDA Designer of the Year and Conde Nast Traveller Designer of the Year. He was named a Top 25 Visionary by TIME Magazine and was recently named “Most Influential Industrial Designer in the World” by Forbes.
Also part of the show was Bethan Laura Wood, who is also a multidisciplinary designer known for her material investigation, artisan collaboration and avant-garde approach to colour, pattern and materiality. Wood explores the relationships we make with objects in our everyday lives and questions about how they became cultural conduits.
She has undertaken multiple residency programmes, including London’s Design Museum and the W Hotel in Mexico City. Wood has worked ongoing with the Nilufar Gallery since 2011 and has had her work commissioned by Moroso, Valextra, Perrier Jouet, Bitossi Ceramiche, Tory Burch, cc-tapis, Tolix, Rosenthal and Hermes, among others. Her work has been exhibited in museums around the world including, V&A Museum of Childhood, Swiss Institute New York, Daelim Museum and MOT, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Both designers showcased and discussed the important of sustainable design and innovation as the key to the future.
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