Since yesterday, our XO laptop, and the Sugar interface itself, are part of the PERMANENT collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Congratulations to the creative teams. Now we just need to clarify the last line of the label for the XO itself…

Part of the exhibit label describing the XO:

lighter than a lunchbox…
Wi-Fi antennas double as covers for the USB ports, for instance, while the handle
servers also as an attachment point for a strap and the protective bumper also
seals to protect from dust. The screen has both a full-color mode and a reflective
high-resolution mode that makes it readable in bright sunlight, and a wide track
pad doubles as a drawing and writing tablet. If electricity is not available, the
computer can be recharged by a pull cord that works like a yo-yo.

Recognizing the Sugar designers:

Lisa Strausfeld (America, b. 1964), Christian Marc Schmidt (German, b. 1977), and Takaaki Okada (Japanese, b. 1978) of Pentagram (UK and USA, est. 1972)

Walter Bender (American, b. 1956)

Eben Eliason (American, b. 1982) of One Laptop per Child (USA, est. 2005)

Marco Pesenti Gritti (Italian, b. 1978) and Christopher Blizzard (American, b. 1973) of Red Hat, Inc. (USA, est. 1993)*

Sugar Interface for the XO Laptop
2006-07
Design: Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Inkscape, and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) software; implementation: Python, GTK+ (GIMPToolkit), and Cairo software

Gift of the designers, 2008

Teams from Pentagram and Red Hat created this icon-driven interface in which collaboration is the core of the user experience. The laptop encourages social interaction, and most activities center on the creation of an object — a drawing, a song, a story a game — and on “real-world metaphors” such as chatting, sharing, and gathering. All the laptops are connected in a wireless network, both to the web and to one another. The more laptops are connected, the more powerful the network becomes. “By exploiting this connectivity within the community, among people and their activities,” the designers say, “One Laptop per Child makes use of what people already know in order to make connections to new knowledge.”