The Laptop Crusade
Photo from Wired Magazine, From left: Design Continuum; FuseProject . Evolution of a Laptop: The prototype was designed and redesigned over a seven-month period. Early models (from left) had a power-generating hand crank, rubberized edges, and a handle to prop up the PC. All along, they've come in an array of colors.
Wired Magazine (August, 2006) has an interview / profile piece on Yves Béhar (The Fuse Project), who is working on the design(s) for the One Laptop Per Child Project (laptop.org. The article covers the nitty gritty of design factors (what are the clients requirements, where does the battery go, what color is the case, etc). More interestingly, though, is a discussion of the philosophy and significance of this project ...
Béhar thinks the laptop project is more pragmatic than his skeptics realize. “There’s a criticism that comes up,” he says. “I think it’s the stupidest argument: Send kids food, send them water.” These critics, he says, imagine all the developing world to be a famine-stricken village in Africa. “This is the typical ignorance of the West. There are different conditions in different places,” he says. “And there are a lot of places where kids are not starving, where kids want to learn more than anything else.”
Then there are the critics who believe the project requires villagers to run a T1 line into the center of town. It doesn’t. In fact, many laptops will go to areas with no Internet access. “Our emphasis is peer-to-peer,” Negroponte explains – connecting kids with each other over the mesh network, and offering schools a $100 server packed with 200 gigabytes of educational mat-erial. If every textbook resided on a server, a country like Brazil would save roughly $20 per kid per year (minus the cost of licensing). When fast Internet access becomes more widely available, the laptops will simply become more valuable. “Let’s not wait,” Negroponte says.
Douglas McGray, The Laptop Crusade, Wired 14.08, August 2006. http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/laptop.html