Bruce Nussbaum writes about the apparent failure of the One Laptop per Child project. I think that the problem is not in the failure of the project per se, but the fact that so many people were blind to its inherent limitations.
The fact that the project was designed top-down without significant research into the usage realities it was supposed to support, is a paradigm of design gone wrong. And as always the problem is not one of usability, but one of irrelevance, which is the essence of the digital divide.
Spending time with users people, and understanding their practices can lead to more meaningful designs. As it stands now, OLPC is a modern, normative solution to a post-modern, complex problem.
As Nathan Eagle noted in a recent article for Interactions, mobile networks are leapfrogging to cover the gap and provide services:
Kenyans are repurposing phones to take the place of other infrastructure they lack, ranging from MP3 players to credit cards….In the small Kenyan town where I live, I can pay for my taxi rides and even groceries through my mobile (impossible in Boston and other places in the West).
References
Eagle, N. (2007). Turning the Rift Valley into Silicon Valley: mobile phones and African entrepreneurship. interactions, 14(5), 14-15.
technorati tags:user-centred, user-centered, technology, design, ethnography
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