TED 2008: designer Yves Behar

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: designer Yves Behar, of Fuse Project. He designed the XO laptop, and the Jawbone Bluteooth headset.

The Jawbone: It has a humanistic technology. It feels your skin, and knows when you're talking and it gets rid of the environmental noise. We wanted to take out the techie and nerdy stuff and make it as beautiful as possible. If it isn't beautiful it doesn't belong on your face. We bring values and these values create a soul for the company we work with.

The XO laptop: (the $100 One Laptop Per Child). Nicholas Negroponte told Behar the design is why kids will want the laptop. He designed it to be iconic, too look like it was for a kid, but not a toy.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Palo Alto at a seminar, and I shot a short video clip of three people, who are a lot smarter than I am, struggling to open an XO laptop: Link

[#1 posted by Kid , February 29, 2008 9:14 AM]

A lot of times I struggled to open a MacBook. I'll try opening an XO when I get my hands on. :)

[#2 posted by Nicholas Weaver , February 29, 2008 9:30 AM]

The XO opening could be made from ANNOYNG to "Piece of cake" by embossing a couple of ikea-style icons in the lid.

[#3 posted by Tom , February 29, 2008 10:12 AM]

The problem with the folks opening the XO is not that the problem is hard, but that there are three of them trying to solve it at once. It's an occupational hazard for people who have a lot invested in smartness: they try to be the one to solve every problem, even in situations when it's better to sit back and let someone else do it alone.

[#4 posted by caseyd , February 29, 2008 10:19 AM]

We had dinner guest, Chris Blizzard then of RedHat, one night last winter. Among his pile of gear ( I think he is his own cloud computer ) was an XO.

The only newbie to the device who could open it deftly was the 8 year old.

[#5 posted by Stefan Jones , February 29, 2008 10:41 AM]

The XO comes with a single (folded) instruction sheet, much of which shows how to open the unit.

[#6 posted by Susan Oliver , February 29, 2008 12:28 PM]

Of course none of them could open it; they're all over the age of 10!

[#7 posted by gadfly , February 29, 2008 1:17 PM]

Nice job, Mark! That may be the most subtle variant of the "OLPC-is-impractical" argument I've yet to see. It doesn't seem like a very fair complaint to me, though.

I'd really hate for these comments to turn into an argument over the XO-1 or OLPC, so I'd just like to end by thanking you for letting us experience TED vicariously.