Yves Béhar MINI_motion Two-Piece Driving Shoe

I may be slow but I eventually do arrive.

Pilar Viladas (then design editor of the New York Times) wrote about this wonderful creation in an article that appeared in the March 14, 2004 New York Times.

Long story short: It's a shoe with a detachable inner slipper for driving.

Here it is September 2006 and I'm just getting around to it.

The question I'd ask is, "What the heck have you been doing for the past two and a half years, joe?"

And the next question would be, "Why are we paying so much for this?"

Memo to file: Think up a clever response to these excellent, smack-dab on-the-money queries.

But I digress.

Béhar's one of my favorite designers; everything he touches turns to magic.

FunFact: His favorite book is the "The Little Prince."

Here's the Times piece.

Curve Your Enthusiasm

Ask Yves Béhar of fuseproject what his work is about, and he'll tell you that it is ''dedicated to the development of the emotional experience of brands through storytelling.'' This makes Béhar sound more like a brand manager or an advertising account executive than what he really is: the new breed of industrial designer.

He's hipper than the good-design problem solvers of the Bauhaus, yet not as brazenly commercial as signature-style superstars like Philippe Starck. The 36-year-old, Swiss-born Béhar, who is based in San Francisco, uses narrative to create a brand around a product.

For Béhar, it's the only way to distinguish a product in the eyes of today's jaded consumers, who, he says, are less likely to be swayed by looks alone. Of course, the firm's designs are compelling enough to have won a long list of awards, but as the name implies, fuseproject's reach extends beyond the conventional parameters of industrial design and into fashion, environments and strategy.

Béhar sees designers as collaborators with their clients in shaping a consumer's experience of a product, rather than just the product itself. He rails against what he calls ''feature creep,'' the gratuitous stuffing of more and more technology into products without making them any easier to use. ''Tactility — how we use and carry products — makes them more appealing,'' he declares.

This approach has pleased fuseproject's clients, like Birkenstock, MINI (a part of BMW) and Toshiba, and has earned it an exhibition that will open this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Béhar designed the Learning Shoe, complete with a chip that collects data on the wearer's feet, just for the exhibition.)

Joseph Rosa, the museum's curator of architecture and design, calls Béhar's approach ''brand fusion,'' and says, ''It's not just about designing something and then leaving the company to market it.'' Or, as Béhar puts it: ''The time of the designer as master is over. Now, the designer is a partner — with a point of view.''

Béhar's point of view developed after he graduated from Art Center College of Design in 1992 and spent several years working for well-known Silicon Valley firms like Lunar Design and frog design. He set up shop on his own in 1999 in South Park, the San Francisco neighborhood that Béhar calls ''the ground zero of the dot-com boom and bust.'' ''I spent a couple of pretty miserable years trying to persuade clients of the importance of physical experience in design,'' he recalls. But a few projects that received favorable press — like the cerebral bottle for spacescent (in which the flask of scent is suspended within a transparent outer container, to evoke the virtual space that fragrance creates around the wearer) — caught the attention of larger companies, like MINI and Birkenstock.

MINI called on Béhar in 2001, to develop accessories around its iconic car, the Cooper, which was being reintroduced 43 years after its debut. The company wasn't looking for the usual logo-based key rings and the like, normally sold by car dealers to people who already own the car. Instead, MINI envisioned that its accessories line, called MINI_motion, would appeal to people who might not own a MINI but wanted to experience what the brand was about.

So rather than reinforce the stereotype of accessory as status symbol, Béhar focused on the transition between being inside and outside the car: every accessory would have a dual function. For example, there's a shoe that has a detachable inner slipper for driving; a watch that reads either vertically or horizontally, depending on the position of your arm; and a jacket that has a built-in seat.

For Birkenstock, fuseproject enhanced the brand's already-famous comfort, while updating the ''70's hippie'' look of the product to appeal to a broader, younger market, emphasizing the ''green'' aspect by literally making a ''window'' in the shoes that reveals its materials, including a biodegradable gel insole. ''It's more interesting than another cool shoe for another cool brand,'' Béhar says. ''You have to put the message into the product, not vice versa.''

The designer believes so strongly in the power of the message that he's currently engaged in a project that involves researching consumer perceptions of brands — there's no product involved. But he's still got plenty of design projects in the works: Scoot, a folding scooter (designed with Johan Liden) that's still in the concept stage; sunglasses tailored to an individual sport; a new clothing line (fuseproject already has a Teflon-coated cashmere windbreaker for Lutz & Patmos); and, in today's ultimate indicator of designer cool, a chandelier for Swarovski's 2004 Crystal Palace exhibition. Béhar, it's safe to say, has many more stories to tell.

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bookofjoe prediction: If Jonathan Ive, vice-president of industrial design at Apple, should leave, look for Béhar to be named to the post in a Cupertino minute.

The Mini_motion website is an utter disaster, as you will see should you venture there.

Béhar may be a master of atoms but he's a dolt with bits.

The bridge between the real world and the virtual is one very few designers seem able to cross without falling over the side into the churning rapids below.

Maybe I better reconsider that Apple prediction, huh?

One determined individual back in the spring of 2004 made a determined effort to procure a pair of these shoes and succeeded; his review is here.

Should you care to read the comments following his piece you'll see that even then, the shoes were essentially unfindable.

Maybe on eBay if you're really intent.

But wait a minute: how is it, Ms. or Mr. Cool, that you have all this time to waste while you're being paid serious money?

Don't you think you're being a pretty poor example to those around you, diligently doing what they're supposed to be doing?

I mean, don't get me wrong: I love your attitude — but hey, I don't sign your checks.