OLPC: Imperfect, Idealistic — and Changing Lives

If we voted for the most talked-about design project of recent years, there’d only be one contender. More words have been spoken, written and blogged about the efforts of the nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child to develop a $100 educational laptop for the world’s poorest children than anything else — and that includes the iPhone.

OLPC has scooped most international design prizes, and dazzled design conferences. “It has done for humanitarian design what the iPod has done for consumer products,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “The world will never be the same.” But OLPC has also been hammered by the tech industry (for suggesting that a computer could cost as little as $100) and by development economists (for suggesting that poor countries should buy laptops, not books or food). Its educational methodology has been attacked, and environmentalists fret about the eventual fate of its discarded computers.

Well, OLPC isn’t perfect, and like so many idealistic initiatives, it has found operating in developing countries to be much more difficult than it ever expected. It is three years since its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, who also co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, announced his plan for a $100 laptop. OLPC hasn’t provided nearly as many computers to needy kids as it had hoped, or hit its $100 target price. Yet some 300,000 children are already using its XO laptops, giving them access to the Internet, electronic books, games, cameras and other learning opportunities. Another 300,000 kids are soon to receive them, too.

Ever since the first test models arrived in schools, OLPC has been upgrading the XO’s design, and developing a second-generation computer. The plans for the new design, the XOXO (or XO 2), are to be unveiled Tuesday. Scheduled for introduction in…