Private Historian

Adam is an acknowledged expert at the genre of literary non-fiction known to the trade as “oral history.” As a genre, oral history is closest to documentary film: It has the same kind of immediacy — the same punch — but with the heft and gravitas of a book. It’s a type of narrative that Adam fell in love with as a magazine editor because it hands the authorial voice to the subjects themselves, allowing them to — in effect — tell their own story. Adam continues to champion the genre, believing that stories are told best by the people who lived them. He has worked with both private individuals and corporations and is always eager to discuss new projects.

Two divergent examples of oral history: The Story Builders is a straight narrative which chronicles the meteoric rise of the Vignette Corporation from two guys and a whiteboard to being one of the breakout stars of the Web 1.0 world at the century’s turn, The book was as privately published, and distributed to key early employees, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Vignette’s IPO. Designing Ideas is equal parts career retrospective and manifesto of Yves Béhar, the noted Silicon Valley designer and entrepreneur. The book is now available from the noted art publisher, Thames & Hudson.

You can read it not only as a timeline of Béhar and his two decades with Fuseproject, but of 21st-century design in general, with its preoccupations laid out page by page, from tech to lifestyle to sustainability. The book is unusually conversational (the text is, in fact, a dialogue-like collaboration with the journalist Adam Fisher), an amiable and frank journey into the twists and turns of the design process that provides rare insight into what it takes to create a seltzer machine (SodaStream) or an electric motorbike (Mission One, for Mission Motors, which set land-speed records) or sustainable packaging (the Clever Little Bag for Puma sneakers) or a robotic bassinet (the Snoo, a recent collaboration with the pediatrician and best-selling author Harvey Karp) and bring it to the market. - Vanity Fair, April 2021