Nicholas Negroponte has been beating the bushes at tech and design conferences and just about anywhere he can get public and press attention to help realize his “impossible dream,” a $100 laptop. Impossible as it may seem, his vision for “one laptop per child” (starting in 2006 with 7 million units and ramping up in following years to 100 million per year) is not just a pipe dream. Major corporations and organizations have signed on to bring the $100 laptop to fruition, beginning in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to schoolchildren. The $100 laptop is being developed by a nonprofit organization (One Laptop Per Child) created by faculty members from the MIT Media Lab. OLPC is based on “constructionist” theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and later Alan Kay, as well as the principles expressed in Negroponte’s book Being Digital. The founding corporate members are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.

The long-term solution to all the world’s ills, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, posits Negroponte, is education. Internet access will provide a window to the world beyond the immediate landscape, and connectivity will provide a sense of community. Laptops are a learning tool with which to think; useful for work and play, drawing, writing, music, telephony, and mathematics. They are a wonderful way for all children to “learn learning” through independent interaction and exploration.

Why a laptop? Negroponte says, “Mobility is important, especially with regard to taking the computer home at night. Kids in the developing world need the newest technology, especially really rugged hardware and innovative software. Recent work with schools in Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one’s studies, as well as for play. Bringing the laptop home engages the family.” Since many third-world villages do not have electricity, the laptop will be powered with various methods, including a crank. It will be connected to the internet using wireless broadband. Each laptop will also work as part of a local area “mesh” network, allowing each computer to talk to its nearest neighbors.

The $100 laptop will not use the expensive components of conventional laptops. There will be a number of intriguing features, like the ability for the screen to be readable in sunlight using a rear-projection screen or a kind of “electronic ink” invented at the MIT Media Lab. It will be usable both as a computer and as an electronic book. The laptop will be loaded with Linux and other open-source software and will have a 500Mhz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 1GB of flash memory. It will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. While it will not be able to store large amounts of data, it will have almost all the other capabilities of a $1,000 laptop.

“It will work at lightning speed,” said Negroponte recently on CNN’s The Charlie Rose Show. “And there will be companies that will develop peripherals for it, like hard drives. We expect to be able to offer an external DVD drive for $10. At first everyone thought the $100 laptop couldn’t be done; now I have manufacturers and developers calling me with ideas about how it can be even cheaper.”

The laptop’s design has been overseen by Kenneth Jewell, design strategist and envisioner at Design Continuum. “Great design is the secret ingredient to the $100 laptop,” he says. “Designing the right experience for students all over the world was our goal, and to do it for a low cost was only one of many requirements. To create a successful product, the team considered much more than cost reduction; we thought hard about a day in the life of a student, from classroom to bedroom.

“We had to provide nothing less than a fully functioning laptop for students so they will have access to tools and information. Second, we had to bend our traditional ‘laptop rules’—unlike my Apple Powerbook, this $100 laptop will function like an eBook to curl up in bed with; it will seal up to be rugged and splash-resistant and, of course, if you don’t have access to a traditional power source, it is designed to be charged up with a hand crank. Finally, the design had to work within the $100-per-unit price structure.”

Why the color green? “We wanted an iconic look for the $100 laptop and color is a bold statement. Green is associated with growth and life around the world. We also liked how Seymour Papert refers to students as having ‘grasshopper’ minds. Color choice communicates tone, speaks to an audience, and creates a persona for a product. Green felt right to introduce the $100 laptop to the world. However, we always felt that the $100 laptop was more like a sneaker than a typical computer; we envision future laptops to come in a rainbow of options to reflect the variety and individuality that each student deserves.”

For years sociologists have been talking about “the digital divide,” the inequities between rich and poor nations’ access to information technologies. If education and internet access can indeed be brought to the poorest and most remote villages on earth, this may very well be a turning point in time for world politics. With the momentum of significant megacorporations behind him and initial commitments from major governments, the realization of Negroponte’s impossible dream may turn out to be nothing less than a revolution in the making.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu