One Laptop per Child

While at Pentagram Design, Christian Marc Schmidt was lead designer in Lisa Strausfeld’s team on the Sugar User Interface for the One Laptop per Child project. Led by Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender, this project—a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab—was about bringing low cost laptops to children in developing countries to accelerate their educational opportunities. The design of the Sugar UI abandons a conventional desktop metaphor in favor of a universal zoom metaphor. Instead of files and folders, the interface was based on people. Children could connect with one-another from their laptops and collaborate on activities together. Prior to the introduction of the iPhone, netbook computers and Facebook, the One Laptop per Child Sugar UI became a new design paradigm for computing devices that is innovative even by today’s standards.