New Work: One Laptop Per Child

Home in the OLPC interface

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. Michael Gericke has designed the identity for the initiative. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.

Called Sugar, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. Children can move through four levels of view—Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity—and connect with others in the network “mesh” formed by users.

After the jump: A tour through the interface.

While traditional computer interfaces are modeled on the desktop metaphor, Sugar places the individual user at the center of the interface, which is icon-based and has four levels of view: Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity. Users can move outward from the Home view, where they can set preferences like color, to the Friends view, where they can chat with their friends, to the larger Neighborhood view, where they can locate other users and gather around an activity. The Activity view looks inward: children, alone or together, can focus on a project at hand. In each view, a toolbar-like frame is available that organizes navigation, people, activities and files around the four sides of the view.

Friends view: Children can find their friends on the network

Neighborhood view: Users can cluster around an activity

Acitivity view: Users can collaborate and chat