I stumbled upon something new and exciting a couple days ago, and while I don’t know enough about it to provide an authoritative report of any kind, I want to bring it to everyone’s attention, in the hopes that others can begin exploring it and help all of us learn more about it.

In a nutshell: it’s a new user interface called “Sugar,” associated with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, former head of the MIT Media Lab. OLPC has been on everyone’s radar screen for a year or more, including the blog post that I wrote on April 14, 2006 entitled “Ubiquitous Computing.” And progress continues, with large-scale commitments to OLPC by roughly a dozen national governments that include the official “launch countries” of Libya, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uruguay; my understanding is that the official launch with “real” computers will take place in August 2007, with initial plans to distribute 5-10 million computers at an average cost of approximately $100.

There are several innovative and exciting aspects of the computer hardware, and the “mesh” networking architecture, that OLPC will be putting in the hands of children; but I’ll leave that for a future discussion, and simply invite you to visit the OLPC website for more information. Similarly, the basic software is interesting, based on a combination of Linux (presumably to Microsoft’s dismay) and the Python programming language; there’s one aspect of the software I’ll discuss below, but I’ll again leave you to explore the technical details on your own.

What I find most exciting about the project is the new user interface (UI) for OLPC; it’s called “Sugar,” and the OLPC developers have described it as a a “‘zoom’ interface that graphically captures their world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing the connections within the community, among people, and their activities. The two thumbnail images shown here obviously don’t provide any details, and provide no indication of whether the UI is pedagogically sound (for children), or whether it will “work” (in any technical sense), or (more important) whether it will be accepted. You can find some details about Sugar at the Pentagram web site, which is designing the UI; and you can find an interesting discussion of Sugar in a March 1, 2007 Business Week article (including some critical comments from UI gurus like Jakob Nielsen) entitled, “The Face of the $100 Laptop.”

So perhaps it will fizzle; perhaps it will fade away and be replaced by something more conventional. But if it works, it could be the first significant change in mass-market user interfaces since Apple borrowed Xerox PARC’s ideas for the Star computer and implemented them in the Macintosh. What I find most significant is the social-networking nature of the UI: instead of the “desktop” metaphor that we’ve used for 25 years, and which mature, office-oriented adults can still relate to, this one is based on the notion of the individual user as the center of a “universe” of personal activities, network clusters to which that individual is immediately connected, and other accessible networks. Whether adults find this appealing or intuitive remains to be seen; but I think teenagers hooked on MySpace and SecondLife would understand it right away. And it will be even more interesting to see whether young children gravitate to it naturally.

It’s also interesting because the initial usage won’t take place in the advanced industrialized countries of North America, Western Europe, and Asia that have spawned much of what we understand about computers — including the hardware, the underlying software architecture and programming languages, and yes, the user interface — but rather from developing nations around the world. It’s easy to dismiss countries like Rwanda and Libya as poverty-stricken “Third World” countries that will never do any innovation on their own; but Brazil and Argentina have significant economies, large populations, and a critical mass of intellectual talent and technological infrastructure. Even countries like Nigeria and Uruguay should not be lightly dismissed; they may add their own innovative bits and pieces to OLPC and Sugar.

It would also be easy to shrug and say, “Well, it looks like it has any possibilities, then Microsoft or Apple will pick it up and take over. Or maybe Sony or Samsung. Or maybe Nokia or Ericsson.” Maybe so, but don’t be too sure of it: on January 12, 2007, the OLPC foundation announced that “contrary to previously published reports OLPC has no plans to make the XO laptops available for sale to the general public.” That may eventually change, of course, but it would be interesting to see how the technological balance of power might shift if (a) the OLPC concept takes off, and Sugar is a great success, and (b) the initial “launch countries” establish enough of a critical mass of usage that they can exert significant influence and control over future developments.

It will also turn out to be interesting if OLPC brings about a generational shift in the technological balance of power. The initial technology — hardware, software, and UI — is being developed by adults, of course; but it’s going to be put into the hands of children. And in that context, it’s important to note that the software component of OLPC is open-source — which means that kids can tweak the code, especially the applications code written in Python. Whether they do so remains to be seen; and whether they go beyond tweaking some of the applications (including some of the games supplied with the computing environment) and begin tweaking the underlying networking and operating-system software also remains to be seen. I don’t have any illusions that such things will be done by nine year old children in a remote village in Africa; but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me if it was done by high-school or university students throughout Brazil and Argentina … and yes, in Libya, Uruguay, Rwanda, and Nigeria, too.

Finally, don’t forget Moore’s Law; it has been the single most important technological “driver” in my adult life, ever since I first started getting paid $3/hour for writing FORTRAN library routines in 1964, and all of the research that I read strongly suggests that the Law will remain in effect for at least another decade or two. And that means we can look forward to something like the following: today’s $100 laptop should cost $10 in about 5 years, and it should cost about $1 in 10 years. That may turn out to be optimistic, because the most critical components of the OLPC project are not likely to be RAM and CPU power, but more mundane things like display-screen technology, and electrical power consumption. So maybe it will take 20 years, instead of 10 years, before we can truly give every inhabitant of this planet his or her own personal computer for a dollar. And by then, we’ll be dealing with a completely new generation…

Meanwhile, take a look at Sugar; and take a look, periodically, at the OLPC wiki; I plan to do so, and will report back with anything interesting that I see…