Technology expands what industry can create. Design helps us decide what is worth creating and why it should matter to people.

Why Yves Béhar’s reflections matter to the future of technology, industry and meaningful innovation

Technology is accelerating.

Artificial intelligence is entering almost every stage of research, product development, manufacturing and communication. Products are becoming more intelligent. Systems are becoming more connected. Industrial processes can analyse, learn and optimise at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

Yet the most important question remains remarkably human:

What genuinely deserves to be created?

In the conversation that follows, internationally recognised designer Yves Béhar offers a clear and timely perspective. Technology may extend our capabilities, but it cannot replace the human understanding required to recognise a real need, interpret its emotional dimension and transform it into something useful, intuitive and meaningful.

This distinction matters.

The growing availability of technology does not automatically produce better products. Nor does greater speed necessarily create more relevant innovation. Technology can help organisations explore possibilities, simulate alternatives and accelerate development. However, it cannot independently decide which possibilities will improve people’s lives.

That responsibility remains human.

Design begins before aesthetics

Design is still too often interpreted as the final aesthetic layer applied to an object after its technical development has been completed.

But meaningful design begins much earlier.

It starts when different disciplines come together to understand a problem. It connects human behaviour, engineering, technology, manufacturing, brand identity and context. It gives visible and usable form to ideas that might otherwise remain abstract.

For an industrial company, design is therefore not separate from performance.

Manufacturing excellence can make an idea possible. Engineering can make it reliable. Technology can make it intelligent. But design determines whether that intelligence becomes understandable, relevant and valuable in everyday life.

“The future of manufacturing will not be defined only by what factories are capable of producing, but by the relevance of what companies choose to create. Design helps us connect industrial capability with changing human expectations.”
Michael Yao, CEO, Homa Appliances

This way of thinking is increasingly important in a world in which access to technology is becoming more democratic.

When similar tools are available to many organisations, competitive advantage cannot depend exclusively on possessing the technology. It depends on understanding how to use it, why to use it and which human problem it should solve.

Artificial intelligence needs human intelligence

Béhar’s reflections on artificial intelligence are particularly relevant to the current industrial conversation.

AI is already changing how information is processed, how alternatives are generated and how products are developed. It can accelerate research, support simulations and reveal connections that would otherwise require much more time to identify.

But AI remains a tool.

It has no lived experience. It does not participate in family routines, prepare food, care for children or experience the frustration caused by a poorly designed interface. It can identify patterns, but it cannot independently understand why a particular moment, gesture or interaction matters to a person.

Innovation still requires judgement.

It requires the ability to distinguish novelty from value, technical possibility from human usefulness, and acceleration from genuine progress.

“Artificial intelligence can accelerate analysis, simulation and development, but meaningful innovation still begins with a clear understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. Technology is most powerful when engineering intelligence and human insight advance together.”
Simon Wu, Senior Vice President, R&D, Homa Appliances

For research and development teams, this creates a new responsibility.

The objective is not simply to introduce more intelligence into products. It is to decide where intelligence can create a clear and valuable benefit, and where technology should remain discreetly in the background.

The best technology does not continually demand attention. It supports people naturally, reducing complexity rather than adding to it.

Design, brand and long-term relevance

The conversation also explores the importance of integrating design and brand strategy from the beginning of a project.

A product never exists in isolation.

It becomes part of a company’s identity, a person’s home and the rituals of everyday life. Its value is shaped not only by technical performance, but also by how naturally it enters its context, how clearly it communicates its purpose and how consistently it strengthens the identity of the brand presenting it to the market.

This is especially significant for an OEM.

The role of a modern OEM is not to impose its own visible identity on its customers. It is to provide the industrial, technological and design capabilities that help each partner become more distinctive and relevant.

The best OEM design does not make the manufacturer more recognisable.

It makes the customer’s brand more recognisable.

For Homa, this means connecting industrial scale, product platforms, customisation, engineering and market understanding in ways that allow different brands to express their own character and respond to the needs of their consumers.

From refrigeration to human benefit

Refrigeration may appear to be one of the most familiar and mature product categories in the home.

Yet it sits at the intersection of some of the most important transformations in contemporary life: health, food culture, energy consumption, household organisation, kitchen design and changing family behaviours.

A refrigerator is an industrial product, but its purpose is profoundly human.

It protects food. It reduces waste. It supports wellbeing. It helps families organise their days and preserve ingredients, meals and memories.

This is why food preservation should never be reduced to a technical feature.

It is a human benefit.

Design is the process that makes this benefit understandable and accessible. It translates cooling technology, airflow, temperature control, materials and interfaces into an experience people can trust and use naturally.

“Design is not aesthetics. It is the process through which technology becomes performance, performance becomes distinction, and distinction becomes meaning. Yves Béhar’s words remind us that the most relevant innovation does not begin with the tool. It begins with the human need.”
Federico Rebaudo, General Manager, Homa Europe

Yves Behar’s Hard-Working Talent

In this open-hearted conversation, world-known designer Yves Behar tells to Homa Design Magazine about the role of design as a catalyst for change and forward movement in a world often too comfortable with the known and safe, and too scared of the unexpected and new. He believes that, while technology, and AI in particular, can be useful as a tool, only humans can understand, and connect with human needs. In that, humans will always be better designers.

A strong supporter of hard work, he reveals how, as a young designer, he earned his place at the decision-makers’ table by showing executives their ideas sketched on paper. Read on to find out how he also believes that engaging creatively with traditional, local crafts and materials, can influence design at a global level.

The soft power of human-driven design in making the world move forward.

In today’s multipolar world, how does design function as a form of soft power, and where is the line between design and activism?
What I’ve told myself, and always have practised, is this idea that as a designer, I’m able to move things forward when I create. And when I create, I’m also an example.

Design is for me a catalyst, the soft power of creativity in the sense that as designers we have to continue to create, to build, to show the future that we believe in. In the world we live in, a lot of the principles of what really makes design successful are interconnected: diversity, universality of ideas, generosity. In a way, activism is what design does, in a world that feels somewhat retrograde.

Are there cultural or geographical contexts where design can drive the most radical change? How do you design without imposing a “global style”?
Design is a mixture of global style and regional, local craft and making. Right now I’m speaking to you from Lisbon, which I fell in love with five years ago. Here in Portugal there’s still so much making, so much craft. I can easily access so many materials and craftsmen to partner with. That allows me to give a new direction to my practice.

For me, global and local, or “glocal”, is a natural state. The creative flow can come from local participation and involvement with craft. Here I’m working with cork and sustainable textiles, local resources influencing global practice. I’ve brought them into the TELO project, the truck we’re building.
We are now in the final stretch, focusing on details and homologation, and we have already produced two working prototypes.

I see an important role for the designer to motivate and engage creatively with traditional crafts that tend to die off unless renewed. The richness of craftsmanship, whether here, in Indonesia, or anywhere in the world, benefits from design, re-energised with new ideas. I like that role of the designer as a connection between the very local and the global.

How do you personally reinterpret the role of the designer with new technologies like artificial intelligence?
Technology is everywhere and AI is just another technology. Some are more disruptive than others, but I do not build projects or companies around a technology, but around human needs. The entrepreneurs, scientists, and technologists that I work with are all humanists.

The hype around AI and the almost monolithic thinking we see today is overblown. I have used AI since the late 2000s and it has been extremely useful. These projects are about education with the Moxie robot, about ageing with the companion ElliQ, and about supporting parents and babies with Happiest Baby SNOO. These embodied AI projects have made a difference by solving one-to-one needs that are personal and real.

AI becomes problematic when it removes the need to learn lifelong skills or abates the need for conscientiousness. Being a designer or a writer requires conscientiousness that AI makes you think you don’t need. In terms of design, AI is just a tool, and it’s terrible at designing. Design is not about stamping a predictable aesthetic everywhere. Design is about connecting to unique human needs.

There was a study where people were shown copies of artworks and then the originals. The emotional impact of the copies was ten times less. Machine-made is not authentic. Human-made is authentic. Without authenticity, we do not connect. Humans will always be better designers.

Do you think multidisciplinarity is a success factor when it comes to design?
When I created Fuseproject, the name was about fusing different disciplines at the service of an idea. With a multidisciplinary approach, we are not saying one practice will be the solution. We are saying we don’t know where the big idea will come from.

Once the big idea is discovered, all the other disciplines are there to enhance it, to make it real. That is very different from specialised groups pulling in separate directions. A multidisciplinary approach creates greater opportunity for discovery and cohesiveness.

I have worked this way for 25 years since I founded Fuseproject, and I feel it is the ultimate way to design and collaborate.

How important is it to integrate design and brand strategy from the start of any project?
Since 2005 we have partnered with over 100 start-ups. Two out of three times we designed the brand and often even the naming of the company. Being part of the strategy, in collaboration with the founders, is a way to define the long-term presence of a company, how it is perceived and communicated.

I have found it very fulfilling, but also impactful in the long term, to create the core notions of the brand. Whether naming products or companies and creating the branding and presence of how they exist in the world, it has become fundamental to our work.

Emotion seems to play an important role in all this. In fact, you once said emotion prevails over aesthetics. What does this mean to you?
To me, beauty is important, but trend and style are not. What’s important is how an object connects emotionally with its user. It is not about throwing colours and shapes at the world. It is about creating the magic that happens through interaction with a product or an interface.

Objects around us can distract us negatively, but we can also design them to interact discreetly in the background, without interrupting. People find that magical, intelligent and emotionally satisfying.

That emotional intelligence is something we need to imbue in the work all the time. For us as designers, contributing to the world means putting things in front of people that fit in rather than interrupt.

How do you reconcile that with visual brand language and brand identity?
When you are creating a brand, for example the TELO Truck we’re working on, you build a design language that will apply to the next vehicle in the family. That does not mean the language should force a product into being something it does not want to be. Context still remains important.

Style has been a trap in design. The idea of a signature style always feels contrived. Why should an aesthetic that is beautiful in one object be transferred to another? Designers should adapt a design language to fit different forms.

What advice would you give to young people wanting to start a career in design?
Really focus on the skills of design. There is so much temptation today to learn everything, to be the accountant, the patent lawyer, the manufacturer, the business owner. Those skills will be learned in due time. The most important skill, the one that differentiates you, is the ability to take ideas and turn them into a reality: a drawing, a mock-up, a manufactured object.

When I was a young designer, I arrived in California from Switzerland, where seniority was very much a thing. But in my late twenties, I would be sitting in rooms with scientists, entrepreneurs and PhDs. They would all talk about an idea, and at some point they would turn to me and ask, “What do you think?” I would make a quick drawing, and suddenly they would see their idea in a new way. That was when I earned my place at the table, regardless of age, accent or background. So my advice to young designers is to focus on this tremendous value you can bring as a creative, and learn all the other things in due time. If you do not build that capacity to be the best designer you can be, skilled at something so unique and so needed, you are missing out

Are you a believer in hard work, like talent is not sufficient on its own?
This is actually a pet peeve of mine. I have had that discussion many times. When people do not understand what it takes to be excellent at anything, they say, “You have so much talent.” It always drives me crazy, because talent without hard work is wasted.

The idea that ability comes from the sky rather than from the ten thousand hours spent developing through trial and error, sweat and tears, is a terrible shortcut.

For me, talent is simply recognising the love of what I do. If I love design, I apply myself completely to it. That is the core of talent: recognising potential, then investing work to build it into something extraordinary.

I often quote Pablo Picasso: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” If you apply your brain to solving a problem, that problem will get solved because you are working on it.

Copyright HOMA 2025- Issued By Homa Marketing dept. on June 2026
For further Information and Press Contacts: info@homaeurope.eu