Adaptive Path Blog

Lisa Strausfeld, Pentagram, with the UI design team
Christian Schmidt, Takaaki Okada, Eben Eliason

First ever UI demo of the OLPC.

Mission is no less ambitious than to educate every child in the developing world.

Based on work of Seymour Papert’s constructionalist theories of learning–children encouraged to make things. “Find ways in which the technology enables children to use knowledge.”

Announced a little over two years ago. Final round of beta machines are right here. First large-scale distribution is happening in September.

Durable, low-power computer. New display technology–both full color and black and white. Works in direct sunlight. Long life battery that can be hand-powered. Peer-to-peer mesh network. Dedicated processor that handles mesh networks.

OS based on RedHat Linux “Sugar”

Sugar is: a tool for learning, for children without prior experience with computers, in multiple languages.

UI is based on abstraction. Less is more. It’s an ethic as well as an aesthetic. Worked well crossing cultural boundaries. Computers had a lot to do without rendering graphics.

UI Building Blocks

XO: an avatar of the self. Can be personalized.

Sugar is based on people, activities, and objects. Color indicates ownership. Activities produce objects.

Field is a type of desktop with multiple views.

Community forms the real conceptual paradigm for Sugar.

“Home Sphere” is a place for myself and my things. “Friends Sphere” is a shared space. “Neighborhood Sphere” is a larger community like a school. Zoom based interaction model–4 levels of zooming between spheres. Fourth sphere is “Activity Sphere” where shared activities are done.

All activities are recorded in the journal: record of all the things you do. Time based and non-heirarchical. Automatic, no saving required. Keeps track of all activities over time. Search and filters help find entries.

Lots of UI and usability issues when users start sharing activities that we’re just now discovering now that the devices are in the field.

2000 developers around the world developing activities. Hope is that it will be like Mozilla add-ons.

Started working on the UI last summer–incredibly rapid. UI is constantly iterated. Constant builds of the OS.

Basic UI features were established before Pentagram got started–things like journal. Pentagram established model, framework, visual language. Making it more of a continuous space. Extension of the best features of current desktop space.

Screen is relatively small so needs all the screen space to do activities, but when you “step back and look up” you are surrounded by friends.

It’s a non-profit effort. “No one is doing this for the money.”

When we started, we just had to work and make a lot of assumptions. Testing cycle is to come. When the feedback comes in, the bugs haven’t been the problem. Kids are still doing amazing things in the field.

Debate about the frame and its discoverability. But in a classroom, if one kid can find the frame, the kid conveys it to others. Kids share the UI with others. Helped the usability quite a bit.

Most challenging view is the neighborhood (”mesh”) view. What should the view be? The scalability is a challenge: how do you represent 200+ people in the neighborhood view? It can be overwhelming.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 6:12 am and is filed under Conference commentary, Interaction Design, Interface design, Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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