kip/bot/blog

Fun little article in the Sunday NYT about the influence of Gary Gygax on generations exposed to D&D. Sunday is when things get summed up from a longer perspective than the news itself, so it makes bigger claims than the obituary.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator� TV show. I mean, so I hear.

The writer, an editor from Wired, goes a little farther than I would, or did. I’m not so sure that D&D kinked us to understand people better, but it fer sher made us more proficient at reducing them and their actions to flow charts and equations.

The article’s worth a read if only to check out the info-graphic, a boxes and arrows play on D&D-driven geekness. It may span too many generations, though. The clip I grabbed shows the TRS-80 and cassettes and Captain Crunch, but also covers Vin Diesel, Peter Jackson and LOLCats. Still, fun exercise to look at the black boxes . . .

I’m pretty blah about my HDTV. There’s not so much content that I’m wowed all the time, SD content looks like crap, and I’ve watched enough seasons of TV shows on an elliptical trainer with my pre-Touch iPod to just think it’s a big TV. I always rave, though, when someone asks. After all, I spent $3000 on the damn thing so it damn well better rock.

But I am smitten anew and lasting. Connecting Apple TV to my girlfriend’s flickr account, I just saw her pictures from Savannah, Charleston and the Wellington Equestrian show in HD glory. The TV brought out the full resolution in a way that flickr on a computer can’t even come close to. The Ken Burns effect (which pans or zooms and pans across photos a la Ken Burns Civil War and other documentaries), sometime mucks things up, but usually does a great job of keeping it lively, making familiar pictures fresh, and enlivening dull pictures.

One of my favorite flickr’ers is Magic Fly Paula, a woman about whom I know nothing aside from that she lives in Portugal, and has cool sets like Invisible Cities, Imaginary Libraries, Imaginary Books, Star Diaries. Much of her work is photoshopped and there’s a mix of Jules Verne (wood and brass) and Umberto Eco (philology and polymath wordplay) and Calvino (fantastical).

So I put her photostream on my HDTV with Renaissance era masses and chants and it was incredible. I looked at J-Rube’s slides from Ecuador and got a great travelogue.

They just need to connect it to the interestingness feed, or the popular or most recent feed and it would be perfect. (Perphaps that’s a project for me to work-around.)

I’ve been looking sporadically at this blog that purports to be by Stephen Fry and keep not believing that it’s actually him — the tech is pretty deep, and surely he can’t be all the amazing things he is (novelist, performer, wit, historian) and a gadget getter. But he is. And look at this lovely pair of sentences about open source and the Asus EEE:

he two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.

The above passage is from a regular column he does for the Guardian. The blog is here.

Nice cuts from  of the XO: 1) reduced chemicals in the battery; 2) low power needs of the machine (1/30 of most devices); 3) quick clip about the non-reflective screen (one slide below):

Doug Coates (plasticbag.org) did a review of the XO for Icon magazine (with a sexy “air” picture of the machine). He’s ambivalent, to say the least, about doing a review in this context:

There’s something troubling about reviewing Nicholas Negroponte’s XO – the so-called “$100 dollar laptop� – for a design magazine. And that I’m writing the piece on my gas-guzzling SUV of a MacBook Pro can only compound the horror.

The XO has been in the news for a while, but icon is the first magazine to actually get hold of one. The thing is, this is not a machine designed to be evaluated by people like me. In all the ways that matter, it’s not a consumer artefact. It’s not trying to wheedle itself into your living room. It has more in common with a clean water pump than it does with an iPod.

As you might imagine from the text, he’s generally behind the project. His strong feelings prompted him to republish the essay on his blog (without Icon’s editorial cuts) and with an intro, where he explicitly talks about the politics of the XO.

But at least he talks about the design from the perspective of a design critic:

Green and white with a tough, textured plastic body about the same size as a lunch-box, it has been optimised in every way to deal with the extreme conditions of its use. Its astonishingly frugal use of electricity allows it to function in areas where power is sparse or even non-existent. The screen switches into an energy-efficient black and white mode that is also readable in direct–even aggressive–sunlight. The rubberised keyboard seals the device against dust and water. Even the friendly green “ears” of the device serve a triple function - acting as latches, protective shields for USB ports and as antennae designed to extend the range of the distributed wifi networks that will connect children across the planet.

There’s more in his review, and hopefully will be more from others.  I’m still intrigued.

Roberto and Lizette Greco are plush toy designers (among other things) who designed a plush mascot for a ‘one laptop per child’ campaign’ (Un Computador por Nino, or UNPC) in Chile. The mascot is pretty cute, and UNPC even has a youTube group.

UNPC does not officially support or promote the XO, they are simply lobbying for one laptop per child as an educational initiative. So Pudu, the mascot, is carrying a less distinctive laptop.

They have a flickrstream about their children’s experience with the XO (the first pic does an evaluation of all the software they’ve installed)

They also highlighted two other piece of educational software: Squeakland, which is the inspiration for eToys; and Scratch, a programming language which looks like an interactive game/environment language. Scratch looked pretty complicated to me, but the Grecos say their kids (aged 7 and used really took to it:

Published a few years ago, Leonardo’s Laptop was a disappointing book. The premise was exciting: how would we conceive computing and the internet if Leonardo were using a laptop, like he used his notebooks?

But the book largely broke down into a discussion of usability and how technology could transform medicine, the arts, engineering, politics. That said, there are some good, Powerpoint-worthy(!), lines from the author and the people he quotes.

I feel … an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may … reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings. — Thomas Jefferson

A fuchsia cell phone might be pretty. But a cell phone that does not require a manual — now that is beauty. – Katrina Galway, Letter to the Editor, Time Magazine

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. — George Lois

JJ Abrams, in his TEDTalk, has some great lines about tools and inspiration.  He relates the importance of his Super 8 camera when he was 10, a synthesizer when we was 14 (he composed the theme to Alias), and he has a great line about his Powerbook:

mystery is the catalyst to imagination

technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me, that blank page is a magic box

the Powerbook challenges me, it says ‘what are you gonna write worthy of me?’

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?

I’m a fan of the XO — the project, the goal, the educational ideas behind it. More than that, I’m fascinated by it.

I have a hard time thinking of what mass-market product has been launched since the PC that is more complex. And I don’t think there’s ever been a product launch as transparent as the XO’s. What a case study: a revolutionary piece of hardware, innovative open source software, designed for a market that may or may not welcome it and an incredibly broad audience.

I’ve got a Flickr photostream, with a bunch of screenshots, but wanted to capture some thoughts on the blog.

First, the project is enormous:

- $100 laptop (it’s now $200, and OLPC hopes to get it to $150)

- for children aged 6 - 12. I think this is the biggest challenge. This age range covers pre-literate kids up through pre-teens, playing simple games through programming.

- Integrated into school curriculum, appealing to government agencies

- be a substitute for textbooks (the swivel screen and glare-proof monitor support its use as a Kindle-like device. Textbooks are scarce in the US, and almost completely non-existent or out-of-date to the point of useless in many of the XO’s target markets.)

- EXPRESSIVE - stimulate the imagination (art, computation, narrative)

- APPROPRIATE - sturdy, stable, long battery life, outdoor use, theft-deterrence

- OPEN - the OS and software must be easy to develop, easy to adapt/upgrade, NOT dependent on another company’s development cycle or staff

Designing something for kids aged 6 - 12 is a massive challenge in and of itself. This challenge manifests itself immediately and viscerally in the keyboard:

(Click for larger image and comments on flickr.)

A snap, but fair, judgement to make is that boy, there sure are a lot of keys: quick keys, amplifier keys (CTRL, FN, etc.), the keyboard itself. To make matters trickier, some of the keys have three values assigned to them. Finally, there’s an inactive slider bar on the top and two types of input devices at the bottom (the middle is capacitive, the outer two resistive). So did they get it wrong? Is it, to quote one designer “a shining testament to the disastrous effects of theory-driven- and designer-driven-design”? Let’s look at what the keyboard needs to do:

- be useful to a 12 year old, who will word process, browse the web, play games, draw, and hopefullly program

- support languages with complex character systems and constructions (more than the US qwerty)

- provide quick key, shortcut usage that power-users expect (unless we think 3W kids can’t be power users)

So is the keyboard poorly designed? If so, is it cuz it’s theory-driven or because it strives to do too much? It still comes back to the age range 6 - 12 year olds. In the states, we can buy our kids different electronic devices at different ages, and the market is awash with chip-driven educational/entertainment devices. But this one has to do it all.

The second big design moment that peole confront in the first minutes with the device is the home screen.

This takes a few minutes to figure out … at least for all my interactive friends. The black border area is hidden from the user’s view, until the cursor is move to any of the four corners — it’s like Expose on OSX. The top black band contains quick links to system things like the network, or the home page, the bottom band contains links to all the applications on the machine. The left and right bands, and I like this, is a clipboard area. Anything the user adds to the clipboard is available here. That’s means a user can collect text, sounds, drawings, photos (from the camera) and have them available in eToyz, an authoring program on XO that has a lot of resemblance to HyperCard of old.

This is a busy home page, after the user has opened several applications. (Notice that the black border is missing, when the cursor is moved out of the corners the full screen is restored.) The ring contains all of the open applications in the form of graphic links, and right clicking allows the user to close the app without having to switch to it. What I love about this part of the interface is the way in which it graphically represents a machine whose RAM is full. Rather than a system resources message, the young user can see that things are pretty crowded and that they might need to balance/fix the situation.

There have been some questions around whether the XO should have a cheap version of Windows. As noted above, there was an early decision to go open-source. Part of the reason for open source is cost — there’s a lot of software and talent that can be leveraged with a Linux system. The other reason is that, with Linux, it’s possible to create a light-weight, clean interface like the one above.