I heard about Yves Baher about 3 years ago. For me, the jury was out until I saw how he was involved in the OLPC (one laptop per child) project.

In this TED talk he talks about designing value into a product. The style of design was a reaction to his first job designing “skins” for computers. He has now set out to really capture the users needs when designing a product. He takes you through an interesting array of case studies showing how design shouldn’t just be an addition to the project, more a set of values that runs in parallel to the product development.

I am familiar with this design driven model for product development, from my previous work at Formway Furniture in New Zealand. This style of product development is the reason they have won numerous international awards with a number of their products. It is a great way to work, sometimes challenging but very rewarding.

Here at Pli we to have set some underlying values that we want our company and products to embody. We look for everything we do at Pli to be: collaborative, pioneering, valued, measured, effective, and–most importantly because it is our main point of difference form other furniture companies–sustainable. Hopefully this design and value led approach will let use keep developing thoughtful and provoking products like the Reee chair.