http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/laptopwinner.jpg
The winner of the inaugural Brit Insurance Design Award has come up with a low-energy computer for use in developing countries. I predict worldwide waiting lists …
Just when I thought I couldn’t bear hearing about yet another design prize, I saw the winner of the London Design Museum’s new Brit Insurance Design Award, for the best new design in any field worldwide. It is a delightful and very clever hand-cranked, $100 (£50) laptop designed by Yves Behar, frontman of the San Francisco-based design studio fuseproject.
The XO-1 laptop has been developed with theOne Laptop per Child organisation which aims to distribute these, with financial backing from a number of business sources, to children in developing countries. The idea, though, is so special, and the design so alluring, that I can easily imagine demand for such a computer among the design and gizmo-conscious in any country, rich or poor.
And this is surely a good thing. So often, designs aimed at those in poor parts of the world are a little cheap or simplistic and, whatever the intent, slightly patronising. Not so the XO-1. But, then, Behar is very much a product designer of our times, aware of how the latest design - even the most stylish is cleverly costed - can aid those for whom the latest wafer-thin Apple laptop, although beautiful, represents several years’ earnings.