Cited: CNN
A visionary designer, best known for such items as the Jawbone Jambox, Herman Miller’s Sayl chairs, and Swarovski chandeliers, is putting his mind and his money into the area of education and technology. Yves Behar is not just putting his efforts into any old education methods either. He along with Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab, are teaming up to build a completely solar powered laptop for the meager price of $100. The new product is the brainchild of Behar and Negroponte and is being targeted at children in the world’s poorest countries. This lighter, less energy driven, and more materials friendly version of the laptop is part of the duos intention of making technology available to everyone, especially children that might otherwise not be able to afford such an extravagant teaching and learning tool.
The project has been on the table for nearly six years. And while it is certainly a worthwhile goal to bring education technology to everyone, Negroponte sees a much bigger benefit to everyone from making computers as available as possible around the globe. He says that with widespread education we will eventually be able to figure out remedies for the water problems facing many countries, pollution, energy, as well as a host of health related issues. The laptops that Negroponte’s group originally designed are already making their way around the globe having distributed over 2.5 million of them from Alabama to Angola, Africa.
The newer version of the laptop was recently on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and like the earlier version it is designed to appeal to kids first and foremost. It has a flexible, durable screen, it is green and has a solar panel that will charge the unit in the sunlight. The new model, dubbed the XO-3, is said to be ideally suited to the target audience.
Behar has been involved in other projects geared to helping the most needy children globally so the XO-3 is nothing new for him. He was asked by the Mexican government and a local optics company to help with their See Better to Learn Better campaign for which Behar designed a collection of customized eye glasses that were given away for free to school children in Mexico. The problem was that in Mexico and other parts of South America wearing glasses was seen as a stigma and therefore avoided even by those children that needed glasses to see. Behar created multi-colored glasses with cool designs and encouraged the children to pick out their own colors and designs that they liked best while also taking part in the larger campaign to encourage kids to wear glasses if they need them while also erasing the stigma associated with wearing glasses.
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My take:
Wow, what a nice story. So often in the news we hear bad news and tales of even worse people. It’s a pleasant surprise to hear about people that want to make a difference and are putting their money and their clout behind the cause. And, I think it is very true what the article says about Negroponte and his vision for how expanding education can help everyone. You never really know where the next big idea will come from but it is in all of our interests to seek out the source of that idea and to encourage the free exchange of information.
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