'Til All Are One

SBS tele­vi­sion recently screened a doc­u­ment­ary about Yves Behar, the per­son behind the dis­tinct­ive indus­trial design of the OLPC XO laptop. It’s a fas­cin­at­ing insight into the mind and influ­ences behind one of the most influ­en­tial design­ers around. The doc­u­ment­ary was ori­gin­ally aired in Novem­ber 2008, so it is a little dated. For example, Yves talks about the “XOXO” XO-​​2, which has since been replaced with the XO-​​3. Nev­er­the­less, it is well worth watching.

You can view the full ver­sion at the SBS Web site. The sec­tion on OLPC starts at 14:48.

UPDATE: if you are hav­ing trouble view­ing the video, try this one instead. The atten­tion to detail and qual­ity is astound­ing. Yves rightly points out that products seen in lesser eco­nom­ic­ally developed coun­tries are nor­mally second hand or second rate. The design is rugged and func­tional. It provides scope for per­son­al­isa­tion. What was most inter­est­ing to me is Yves’ com­ment­ary on the key­board. Its one-​​piece design means that the let­ters can be prin­ted in one silk­screen­ing pro­cess. This makes it feas­ible to trans­late into lan­guages that would be uneco­nom­ical with a stand­ard key­board design.

The video of my talk at linux​.conf​.au is online. You can watch/​download it online.

Over­all, I think it went quite well. A per­sonal cri­ti­cism is that I need to ser­i­ously cut back on my use of ‘um’ and ‘ah’ sounds. Sug­ges­tions on com­bat­ing this prob­lem and/​or gen­er­ally improv­ing my speak­ing skills are welcome.

Speak­ing of talks, I found this one by Sir Ken Robin­son to be espe­cially illu­min­at­ing. It’s sum­mary of how and why tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion meth­ods are fail­ing us, and what we can do about it. I think it goes some way towards explain­ing the kind of think­ing behind OLPC.