New Work: One Laptop per Child

Since it began issuing laptops in 2007, One Laptop per Child, the initiative to put low-cost computers in the hands of the world’s poorest children, has provided its XO laptops to an astonishing 2 million students and teachers in countries and regions all over the world. The program, founded by Nicholas Negroponte, has fostered a growing community of educators, developers and supporters, and has helped change the lives of children in Afghanistan, Paraguay, Madagascar, Kenya, India, Argentina, Nepal, Gaza and the West Bank, among others.

Pentagram’s Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed a new site for OLPC that helps focus on this new phase of the project: the use of the laptops and how they are helping to empower children. Previous versions of the OLPC site emphasized the organization’s mission and laptop technology. Now that the laptops are in use, the new site details the accomplishments of the program, helps create a sense of community and encourages continued support. The site has an editorial focus and acts as a kind of OLPC “mother ship,” or hub, that serves to aggregate news and information about OLPC and surface the communities that have grown up around the program. The homepage shares stories and photos of children and classrooms that use the laptops. News updates are color-coded by source, and the site features an interactive map of the world that shows the countries and regions that have signed on to the initiative, with links to local updates via the OLPC Wiki. The site uses the language of simple graphic icons that Pentagram’s Michael Gericke developed for the organization’s identity. The new site was developed by Upstatement.

Pentagram has been involved with OLPC since the organization’s inception. This is the third time we’ve designed the OLPC site, following the initial launch in 2007 and an update in 2008. Michael Gericke designed the OLPC identity, and Lisa Strausfeld designed Sugar, the XO laptop’s graphical user interface.

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One Laptop per Child Website Gets an Update

After its success last year, One Laptop per Child is again extending its Give One Get One campaign where participants buy two XO laptops, one of which is donated to a child in a developing country and the other of which the donor can keep for themselves. In coordination with the program, OLPC has launched a redesigned website designed by Lisa Strausfeld and Christian Marc Schmidt. The new site is an evolution of the previous one and was designed to more actively engage visitors through videos, frequently updated news feeds, Flickr photostreams and interactive demonstrations of Sugar, the laptop’s user interface.

OLPC is also taking its marketing campaign and distribution system to a new level this year, making the laptops available through Amazon and partnering with media companies such as CBS and Time Warner as they donate TV time, billboard space and magazine pages to raise public awareness about the initiative. Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Lab and chairman of OLPC, spoke to the New York Times yesterday about the new campaign and the laptop program, which he says is "unequivocally working."

Pentagram has been involved with OLPC for several years now, with Michael Gericke having designed the organization's identity and Strausfeld having developed Sugar as well as the previous incarnation of the website. Their work for the nonprofit has won several awards including a 2008 International Design Excellence Award and a prestigious INDEX: Award.

A look at the new site after the jump.

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Sugar UI Wins IDSA Award

The 2008 International Design Excellence Awards were announced today and Sugar, the user interface designed by Lisa Strausfeld and her team for One Laptop per Child, won a Silver in the Interactive Product Experiences category, one of four awards that went to OLPC in this year’s competition.

Our design for United Airlines’ First and Business class cabins was a finalist in the Transportation category.

The IDEAs are sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and BusinessWeek magazine; full coverage here.

Lisa Strausfeld in MoMA’s ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’

The Museum of Modern Art’s landmark new exhibition, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” opens this weekend. Curated by Paola Antonelli, the exhibition “highlights current examples of successful design translations of disruptive scientific and technological innovations, and reflects on how the figure of the designer has changed from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinary dynamic reality.” Two of Lisa Strausfeld’s recent projects are represented: Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop per Child initiative, chosen to represent large-scale, community-oriented design and demonstrated in the exhibition on two XO laptops, and Lisa’s visualizations for the New York Times Magazine article “Rewiring the Spy,” featured as an example of a critical visualization. Two hundred other objects, installations and concepts are also on display including examples of nanodesign, 3-D printing and organic design.

“Design and the Elastic Mind” opens to the public on Sunday, 24 February and is on view through 12 May 2008.

Give One XO Laptop, Get One

Through 31 December, One Laptop Per Child is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. Donate a XO laptop to a child in a developing country and receive one for the child in your life. Originally a two-week campaign that began in mid-November, the extended Give One Get One offer is the first time the laptop has been made available to the general public.

Lisa Strausfeld and her team have designed a temporary website for the promotion that educates donors about the organization’s mission, while it takes cues from consumer websites through the use of detailed product shots and overviews of the software. The site also provides a walk through of Sugar, the user interface developed by Pentagram with Red Hat and OLPC.

Website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Asad Pervaiz in collaboration with OLPC and Eleven. Identity design by Michael Gericke. Site development by Nurun.

One Laptop Per Child Wins INDEX: Award

INDEX, a non-profit organization based in Copenhagen whose mission is to support design that substantially improves human life, has presented One Laptop Per Child with a prestigious INDEX: Award. Every two years, one award is given in each of five categories: Body, Home, Work, Play and Community. OLPC won in the Community category, as the jury surmised: “Without a computer-literate population, developing countries will continue to struggle to compete in a rapidly evolving, global information economy.” Pentagram developed the laptop’s interface and designed the organization’s identity and website.

New Work: One Laptop Per Child

Pentagram has designed the identity and website for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations.

The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood, that utilizes the icons of the OLPC laptop interface, also developed by Pentagram. The website design employs these symbols as the basis for navigation. Each icon leads to a corresponding section of information: the laptop to a section about hardware and software, the arrow to a section about participation, and so on. The site launched in English but is currently being translated into many languages.

Identity design by Michael Gericke and Dimitris Stefanidis; website design by Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt, Nina Boesch and Takaaki Okada. Site development by Nurun.

New Work: One Laptop Per Child

Home in the OLPC interface

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. Michael Gericke has designed the identity for the initiative. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.

Called Sugar, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. Children can move through four levels of view—Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity—and connect with others in the network “mesh” formed by users.

After the jump: A tour through the interface.

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