A Story about Bicycles

Many years ago I worked for a delinquency prevention center, where children from low-income households would receive bicycles as Christmas gifts. I remember being horrified by the fact that by the New Year the bikes had often been sold by the parents and that it was hard to interact with people afterwards who could be so callous and selfish about their children's rights to innocence and play.

I think I've gained a little more perspective on poverty in the intervening years, although I still think that many of those parents were users and substance abusers. Chances are that at least some of those parents thought paying household bills that benefited the entire family might be more important than supporting a resource that could only be used for a single member. In other words, we often gave little pastel-colored bikes to the smallest tykes without considering how the parents who couldn't ride them might be coming up with bus fare to get to work.

Now that I have children of my own and have had to face certain fiscal realities in helping to run a household, albeit on a middle-class first-world scale, I see something different in the case of the missing bicycles. And it makes me see the MIT Media Lab's program for the Hundred Dollar Laptop differently. At SIGGRAPH I saw their prototypes in person for the first time, which are designed to provide portable devices for computing to the developing world.

In the past I've promoted the MIT laptop design aesthetic here on Virtualpolitik and have been lukewarm toward critics who promote cell phone technology as a more easily supported alternative. But since actually using one to do word processing, peruse news feeds, and surf the web, I find myself with concerns about their choice to create a model that is so small and toy-like and so unlike a grown-up laptop in scale and tangible experience.

The adorable little green-and-white devices had keyboards far too small for even my very wee adult hands. (I've always been self-conscious about having child-sized hands, and it made me feel like an even more inadequate music student than I already was growing up.) The MIT laptops seem to be both easily outgrown and hard to use for the rest of the family, even though the older generation also might have pressing needs for web-based information and editable text processing.

By going with this design aesthetic, is the MIT group making the same mistake as we made with our bicycles? Do humanitarians need to watch out for romanticizing ideas about the separateness of childhood?

Finally, how will this lilliputian device make a larger or older child with equally profound or perhaps greater literacy needs feel in comparison to his or her smaller and more nimble counterparts? I know from teaching them that this sense of disproportion of size to ability is often a feature of the lived experiences of special needs children here in the U.S.

Is the project also unintentionally writing off girls who are kept at home to watch younger children or being excluded from school to encourage an unwanted marriage? It was difficult and time-consuming to type the sentence that you see above, and I have hands the size of my eleven-year-old. The hands that type these words are probably smaller than those of many of the girls in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who desperately need a broader view of the world and one enriched by literacy experiences. For these girls, perhaps a six-dollar uniform is a better investment.

Update: Apparently, keeping the XO laptop "out of the hands of adults" was part of their design strategy according to this demo video from SIGGRAPH.