2010 New York

IIDA New York Leaders Breakfast "The Power of Design"

IIDA Leaders Breakfast

Hundreds of industry professionals gathered at Gotham Hall on May 13 for the New York Leaders Breakfast. A big thanks to Bill Moggridge and Yves Behar for their inspirational words and deeds. And thanks to all of those who attended!

2010 New York Honoree Majora Carter

Born, raised, and continuing to live in the South Bronx, Majora Carter travels around the world in pursuit of resources and ideas to improve the quality of life in environmentally challenged communities. She founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001, and by 2003 had implemented the highly successful Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (BEST) program — a pioneering green-collar job training and placement system. She is currently president of the green collar economic consulting firm the Majora Carter Group, LLC. Her vision, drive, and tenacity earned her a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, in addition to recognitions from Essence Magazine, the New York Post and the BBC World Service.

Thanks to our Leaders Breakfast National Benefactors

The Event Featured Bill Moggridge and Yves Behar, Moderated by Cheryl Durst

Bill Moggridge oversees the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. He is also credited with designing the first laptop computer, the Grid Compass, in 1981. Moggridge describes his career as having three phases, first as a designer, second as a leader of design teams and third as a communicator. With the co-founding of IDEO in 1991, he turned his focus to developing practices for interdisciplinary teams and built client relationships with multinational companies.

Since 2000, Moggridge has been a spokesperson for the value of design in everyday life, writing books, producing videos, giving presentations and teaching. He was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Awards at the White House in 2009. This award is given in recognition of an individual who has made a profound, long-term contribution to contemporary design practice.

Yves Béhar is the founder of fuseproject, an integrated design agency dedicated to the development of the emotional experience of brands through story-telling. The diverse experience and mediums practiced by the fuseproject design teams span products, environments, graphics, packaging, apparel and strategy. Béhar’s designs and creative positioning are contributing to areas as diverse as technology, furniture, sports, lifestyle and fashion, for clients such as Herman Miller, MINI, Nike, Cassina, Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson, Swarovski, Birkenstock, Toshiba, Sony, One Laptop Per Child, Target and Coca Cola.

Béhar’s approach combines the application of new technologies and unique functions with a humanistic perspective. By fusing poetry with pragmatism, innovative ideas are applied to the products: bringing story and message into the product experience. This unique approach has been internationally recognized in museums and competitions alike. Béhar has been recognized as one of TIME magazine’s 25 visionaries for 2007 and also as one of Creativity magazine’s Creativity 50 for 2008. He is also a recipient of the prestigious National Design Award for industrial design, awarded by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum. His work can be found in the permanent design collection of the Musee National D’Art Moderne/Centre Pompidou, NY MOMA, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the SFMOMA, the Munich Museum of Applied Arts and the Chicago Athenaeum Museum as well as in private collections.