Sugar Town

Sugar, the user interface for the One Laptop per Child project, is featured in BusinessWeek. “It’s the first complete rethinking of the computer user interface in more than 30 years,” writes Steve Hamm.

Sugar offers a brand new approach to computing. Ever since the first Apple MacIntosh was launched in 1984, the user interfaces of personal computers have been designed based on the same visual metaphor: the desktop. Sugar tosses out all of that like so much tattered baggage. Instead, an icon representing the individual occupies the center of the screen; “zoom” out like a telephoto lens and you see the user in relation to friends, and finally to all of the people in the village who are also on the network.

“We’re trying to use as many references as we can to the physical world so it will be easy for kids who haven’t used a computer before to use this foreign thing,” says Lisa Strausfeld, the Pentagram partner whose team is working on Sugar.