Putting Computers in Hands of Every Child

Innovator">Innovator Nicholas Negroponte combines imagination, engineering and idealism to bring laptops to the world's children

22 February 2010

Adam Phillips Nicholas Negroponte hopes to place a laptop in the hands of every child on the planet.

Even as a youngster growing up in New York City in the 1950's, it was clear that Nicholas Negroponte would find a way to combine his love and aptitude for art and mathematics.

When he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 to study architecture, the field used extremely primitive computer graphics to do its modeling. Although the birth of the personal computer was still a decade away, Negroponte saw a wider potential for the new machines as tools, not only for industrial design but also for personal creativity.

Today, he credits his education in architectural design for preparing him to become an innovator in the development of sophisticated human-computer interface systems.

"I found that architecture training [as contrasted with] computer science training, made you much more daring. You didn't solve problems, which engineers do, but you asked questions and you would keep pushing the envelope." Negroponte was passionate about the many ways that research into human/computer interface lay at the intersection of art and mathematics.

Innovator

That passion was shared by Jerome Wiesner, MIT's president at the time. After Negroponte joined the MIT faculty, the two became friends as well as colleagues in the MIT Architecture Machine Group which Negroponte founded in 1967. Years later, as Wiesner neared retirement, he confided his desire for a lab devoted to the research and development of the human/computer interface. Negroponte immediately offered to build it for him.