the Onda

I've been cynical about the One Laptop Per Child project ever since I first saw Nicholas Negroponte talk about it at the D conference two years ago. That said, I'm really happy to be wrong in that it seems like it's way more than a science fair project and that millions of kids may actually reap enormous benefit from this little $100 laptop that could.

This morning I was reading an article in Businessweek about the OLPC's innovative UI (which the guys tell me was apparently shown on a real X0 at Pycon this year [it's mostly written in Python]) which talks about how innovative the UI is because it abandons a lot of the WIMP metaphor we've been stuck with for the past 30 years.

While I am all for innovative interfaces, I wonder if starting with the world's poor is the best approach to take. It's not that I don't think that an OLPC alum couldn't pick up a WIMP interface very quickly (after all my first "computer" was a Milton-Bradley Bigtrac and that helped me understand programming probably more than any other single toy I had growing up)— it's just that building up a whole new set of interaction primitives seems like a big risk to take on an audience which is already taking on a lot in using the OLPC in the first place. It's taken 30 years to polish windows, menus, and gestures (which of course the OLPC team will no doubt leverage experience from) and it seems a little strange to dump it in favor of something radically different.

Plus, I'm not sure that fancy New York graphic design firms (the article talks about how Pentagram is doing design for the OLPC) are best positioned to take on this job. After all, even the folks at Apple cribbed heavily from Xerox PARC back in the day.

However, I've learned my lesson with the OLPC and my pragmatic cynicism, and am thus optimistically awaiting the release of Sugar and the X0.

Post a comment