(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