Is the XO hate just sloppy design thinking?
I’m blogging about the XO because it feels like most interactive professionals are rushing to judgement (positive and negative) and missing an opportunity to dig into a rich design case study.
When I say “most interactive professionals”, I’m referring to the voices I’ve come across on blogs, twitter, and some searches. It’s not a scientific sample, by any means. However, the rush to harsh judgement, and the lack of any real in-depth looks, makes me suspicious. In our daily work, we spend hours and hours watching users look at slightly varying shades of color, or small pixel level adjustments to improve the performance of a page by .5%. We spend hours and hours speculating about what features the next OSX release might have, and then many more hours evaluating them. But, for the XO, it seems like we have it all worked out in 20 minutes or from the press coverage.
I wish there were people out there who were explicitly evaluating the XO against: 1) the educational approach driving the project; and 2) research addressing how kids approach computers for the first time.
The first point refers to constructivism, an educational theory which can be summarized crudely (to the point of coarse vulgarity) as kids grow cognitively by doing things rather than simply being taught. There’s too much to cover in a blog post, but even Papert’s summary is better than nothing:
The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education… From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as [the construction of] a meaningful product. [italics mine]
The constructivist point of an XO, and there are other points (such as providing digital textbooks via the internet), is to get kids building and making things with a computer. I haven’t dug deep into the literature, but there are some places that look at the tools underlying this approach and how well they work: Life-Long Kindergarten, the Maine Laptop Initiative, and the robotics-in-school wave sparked by LEGO’s Mindstorms. Experiments like this are, by nature, hard to conduct. The lab is usually restricted to a single classroom, maybe a school district, or, at best, one state. I would love to hear designers and others talk about this.
(Interesting) sidenote: an individual’s early experience with computers seems to be a strong factor in whether people are inclined to like or put the hate on XO. As a kid, I took an 8th grade programming course on a TRS-80 and it created a lifelong fascination with math, science, generative design, computation, digital creativity. When I was eight or nine, I played with a lunar lander program (your craft is falling to earth and you can use direct or rotational thrust to land safely). It was a painfully slow computer (a phone handset was placed in large rubber holders to talk to the mainframe at CMU), but I spent an entire afternoon plugging numbers in, waiting three minutes for a response, recording the results, and backing into the rules driving the game (to say I was backing into the math would be an exaggeration, it wasn’t as formal as that). I was, in effect, “reverse engineering” and learning a complex system.
Slightly younger friends of mine had Commodore 64s with Turtle Art (the epitome of a constructivist software app, shown below) as kids. They also seem to be predisposed to liking the XO. For all of us, there is a sense that these constructivist moments were as valuable in forming our clearly fabulous minds and inspiring us to learn as any formal schooling we had.
Understanding, and actually looking at, the constructivist underpinnings and implementation of the XO seems to be missing from most design discussions of the tool.
The second point, how kids approach computers especially when they are largely undirected, is another area where I think western designers are missing an opportunity (or being sloppy). We’re all very well versed in how comparatively affluent consumers approach websites and other interactive experiences. We also have an idea of how supervised kids approach the web, but do we know anything about how kids learn them for the first time and alone? When we “laugh our asses” off at the operating system, what is it based on? How do we know that the OS is inappropriate?
Again, I don’t personally have a lot of data points, but one project that is repeatedly referenced is the Hole in the Wall, a program where unattended computers are made available to kids in India. From PBS:
From the slums of New Delhi to the coastal roads of Banda, hundreds of poor kids in India go online every day at free, outdoor computer kiosks installed in slums and rural villages to read news headlines, befriend cartoon figures, draw with digital paintbrushes and explore the possibilities of cyberspace.
There are no manuals, no adults to guide the kids, and it’s a Windows machine (originally an English version). The kids (who appear to skew older than the OLPC target by three years), teach it to themselves and each other.
There are a lot of design challenges against new assumptions in the XO, so the question for me is: why aren’t designers trying to learn from the XO or at least do a more informed critique of its design?