kip/bot/blog

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 Textbooks are scarce in the US, and almost completely non-existent or out-of-date to the point of useless in many of the XO’s target markets.)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.

I had no idea of the controversy surrounding the XO until I started twittering, flickring, and FBing my excitement at receiving mine in the mail. The range of reactions (and going-in assumptions) to it are wild:

- it’s a patronizing toy
- these kids need anything but a computer
- it should be windows and run like other computers
- it should be part of a guided curriculum
- it should work better without any teacher present
- it’s too complicated
- it’s too childish
- it’s too innovative and gratuitously so
- it’s not innovative enough
- WTF is this? and this? and this? and THIS?

One designer at Behavior, wrote:

We installed the OLPC Sugar emulator (via VMWare) here at Behavior and laughed our asses at it for about 20 minutes. It really is a shining testament to the disastrous effects of theory-driven- and designer-driven-design. You’re not missing much, but if you need to satisfy you curiosity and/or have a few lulz you should try it.

There is an almost gleeful delight in trashing the XO.  I’ve shown my XO to dozens of people (most of them willing observers, though I have been a little aggressive with strangers in the subway) and a significant number are ready to pronounce it an arrogant failure after moments, or, to be fair, minutes of interaction.

Perhaps that’s the right litmus — aren’t interactive designers taught that we have mere seconds to win an audience? On the other hand, don’t games, handhelds, new OSes, and even the iPhone require several minutes, or even hours of acclimation?

Many of the criticisms above are against the concept itself, some of them are about the implementation. The Economist ran a review that seems pretty even-handed. The reviewer respects the concept:

Indeed, Mr Negroponte’s vision was brilliant. He planned to blanket the developing world with tens of millions of $100 laptops for kids. The low cost would come from a tripartite “perfect storm�. First, economies of scale: sales would be directly to governments, who could only buy quantities above 1m. Second, the machines would bypass Intel’s processors and Microsoft’s software in favour of open-source stuff. Third, commodity parts would keep the price low.

He also respects the innovations (the screen, flash drive, element-resistance, PC to tablet factor). His final reasons for criticizing it are that: 1) they were naive about dealing with educational ministries; 2) naive about distribution and how quickly they would achieve scale; 3) that the final implementation stinks (his machine crashed frequently and he found the OS impenetrable); 4) that the folks were arrogant to the point of not listening to any criticisms legitimate or otherwise.

OLPC folks respond on their wiki, in a tone that is as respectful as the Economist’s critique. Their main points can be summarized: 1) a few facts in the article are wrong; 2) yes, the flaws exist, but these are flaws (crashing, slow load times) that are true to all computers, so the question is ‘by what standards are these flaws too severe?; 3) some bigger picture factors that may be overlooked, such as the rhythms of educational software, the tradeoffs needed in such an ambitious design. The closing of the wiki post is great. It includes the last, praising, line of the Economist’s review, and the OLPC response:

“Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.�

Not a bad obituary, but our work is not yet finished.

I bought mine, partially cuz I love the idea, and partially out of professional interest in the design.  Initial thoughts from the first day of play in a Flickr photoset.