The OLPC Interface: some poor assumptions?

I just watched a video of the OLPC Interface, and I think they may have made some poor assumptions here at the start. For those who haven’t heard of it, the One Laptop Per Child project is a very aggressive idea intended to close the knowledge gap between the first and third worlds. Basically, governments can buy thousands of hand-crank-powered laptops and distribute them to kids in all the villages around the world. I applaud this project sincerely, but think they may have some core assumptions wrong in the details of the interface.

To wit:

• The icons along the bottom are simple, which is good, but some of them may assume western concepts: chat is represented by a cartoon talking baloon. Is it that way everywhere?
• To save a file (like in the wordprocessor), the child would click on a little icon that looks like a 3.5″ floppy disk. Who has seen one of those in the last 6 years?
• The web icon is a little globe– there’s that damned ‘wolrd wide web’ metaphor showing up again. Even Tim Berners-Lee regrets this metaphor. I guess we should be thankful it’s not a little spider. What is the most simple and universal icon that says “search for information”? It’s not a magnifying glass– that’s left over from Sherlock Holmes…

Perhaps the solution here is to open up the icon set for adaptation culture-by-culture. That would certainly be fitting in with the Open Source model, save on labour, and allow each group to get the best icons/interface going for them. Who knows? A gecko might be associated with ’searching’ in some parts of New Guinea. Moreover, it gives the Cultural Minister something to do.