OLPC: First-World Transference

"...audiences of all kinds most applaud what they like best."

- J.K. Galbraith

It's become quite popular to bash The Little Green Laptop: members of The Affluent Society tend to project their own circumstances onto others -- upon the less-fortunate, the less-civilized and even the the unspeakably barbaric. But where there's transference, I smell the fetid, cynical messaging of moneyed interests being repeated by the unthinking & complacent rabble.

A $100 laptop is threatening to the hardware and software regime, so it's no surprise that Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Bill Gates and even Scott McNealy have been trash-talking the machine, while offering little factual support for their received wisdom. But that's the obvious dissent that should be expected of interested parties if not of narcissistic hypocrits.

I find uncanny -- and surprising -- the amount of unimaginative and blindered thinking in blog comments and in the YouTube comment section, reflecting how reluctant or incapable affluent people are of placing themselves in the rural African, Asian, South American or even the impoverished urban US environments. There's so little consideration for the social and technical mountains the OLPC project has taken upon itself to scale. People seem to have trouble imagining what it's like to live in a favella, without power and where you might have to walk 100 yards or more to get water, or how difficult it might be to get bandwidth to grass huts in remote townships. Thoughtless quibbles about interface design of OLPC, in light of its thoughtful holistic product design, reveal a great deal about where we are at.

Brad Linder's post on the Download Squad blog about OLPC falls leaden onto the propaganda pile. The title is aimed to discredit OLPC through negative framing: "Will the OLPC interface ruin computing for millions of kids?", while the story itself is rather more balanced. Shame on Brad for his backwards headlining. A better question is 'Will the OLPC interface show what's wrong with the ones we already use?'

It's important to note that the interfaces to which we are accustomed in the First World -- Windows, GNOME & KDE -- and with the notable exception of OS X (which is perfect in every way) are probably the flawed ones, and the "Sugar" interface of the OLPC is likely to be proven the more natural, the more correct, the more universally relevant and the more popular interface within a few short years. It is certainly the most energy-efficient. Sugar will outnumber other interfaces by several multiples, once OLPC gets its wings; and Sugar will be defining the UI across language and cultural barriers for several generations.

Here's a demo of the Sugar UI on YouTube (from 90percentofeverything). Have a look for yourself... [Double-click the video image to run it full size.]

Comments

[wayan]

For children, and the next generation, Sugar will be an amazing tool for discovery. We love it already: http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/olpc_emulated_sugar_ui.html

For this generation, and those looking for work in the developing world, there will be a huge hurtle to move off the known Windows interface (Mac doesn't much exist outside the rich countries).

Or to put it another way, Windows/MS Office skills get a Kenyan a job. Mac or Linux anything does not, regardless of what UI may be better.

[Sam]

Wayan-

Thank you for your comment. I encourage you to keep up the quality of debate you are fostering at OLPC News

For this generation in any country, doing almost anything with a PC seems to require a "huge hurtle" [sic].

I think it is appropriate to view OLPC as affecting only next-gen kids.

If my own 8-year-old daughter is any guage, the next-gen in any nation or language will move from one UI to the other as if swapping chairs. She is undaunted by Linux, by different vintages of Mac OS and by Windows. The UI cues tell her roughly the same things on any platform.

Adapting to the chosen OS & UI platform at the workplace is not a matter of weeks or days, but hours for those already exposed to computers. For those not exposed to a computer, your assumption of employment difficulties would hold. The OLPC mitigates that problem for every single child who gets one.

[Harry]

Quote from article - "Thoughtless quibbles about interface design of OLPC..."

A criticism of the interface design, together with extensive user testing, is what is going to ensure that the project fulfills more of its massive potential.

It's not thoughtless to quibble. It's thoughtless to blindly accept a design just because it has honorable goals. We need to prove that the design is suitable or unsuitable by doing testing on real users, rather than just arguing about it on our blogs.

[Richard Karpinski]

The fact that there will be a lot of them makes them attractive for study. Harry's point can be amplified to suggest that UI testing tools would be a valuable asset and not too hard to build for such a single known platform.

This is the biggest educational experiment in world history. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity to test and improve multiple user interface styles as well as strictly educational products. Note that the large audience makes it easy to test an educational approach in several variations and thus create some actual science there.