The OLPC XO came to UNICEF. One of our goalss was to design new ways to distribute UNICEF content to youth in the developing world. The project was based upon creating a collaborative learning system such as a wiki, but we explored a range of content-sharing and content-building tools that would also enable the use of other media devices such as cellphones or PDAs. We hosted a conference with a team from OLPC, MIT, Harvard and UNICEF to discuss building aninterface for the XO, which is also known as the $100 Laptop.
My last six weeks at UNICEF was spent concepting ideas for this system we called UNIWIKI (a name that was never meant to stick). It was exciting to be the designer on a project that was actually delivered inthe XO laptops to classrooms in South America and Africa this last April.
My final project was helping to develop a working prototype for the J8 Conference in Germany for youth participating in this year's GB Summit using the XOs. One of the exciting outcomes was that while the system was initially intended to document the teen's work during the conference, it ended up becoming a large part of their social interactions.