Global winner ... Behar's XO-1 laptop
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 the One 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.
Born in Switzerland in 1967 to an East German mother and Jewish-Turkish father, Behar set up fuseproject in 1999; his blue-chip clients have included Birkenstock, Herman Miller, Hewlett Packard and Nike. Mass production of the hand-cranked computer began in Taiwan in November last year. The manufacturer, Quanta Computer, has said that it expects to ship between 5 and 10m XO-1s in 2008 to the governments of the eleven countries who apparently agreed to buy them. For the record, these are Argentina, Brazil, Ethiopia, Libya, Mexico, Mongolia, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay. A version of the X0-1 is also planned for the mass market.
Dustproof, rustproof, weatherproof - as far as technically possible - the powerful Wi-Fi laptops can, theoretically, be used pretty much anywhere. Hand-cranked radios and torches have been around for some while now, but a computer that doesn't need to be plugged in for a recharge is really quite special.
The AO-1, like the Tata Nano - the £1,000 Indian mini-car from the most likely future owners of Jaguar - might just set a trend for chic, low-cost design that will make the manufacturers of high-priced glamour goods watch their corporate backs as well as their costs. But, if someone could make a hand-cranked laptop that looked like and sounded like a good, old-fashioned reporter's typewriter, I'd be first in the queue. Come on Yves; you can do it.
