The British inventor has won a prestigious design award for his invention of the laptop. But are its days numbered by the success of the iPad and other tablet computers?
More than half of the computers sold worldwide this year will be laptops ? the easily portable form of the PC that for some people has become as indispensable as clothes. People carry their laptops around with their entire lives on them; Nicholas Negroponte, the futurist who headed the MIT Media Lab, was once asked to check his laptop in as he entered a building. Asked by the receptionist how much it was worth, he replied "half a million dollars" ? and explained that it wasn't the physical machine, but the data on it that he valued so highly.
But without the work of Bill Moggridge, perhaps we wouldn't be carrying laptops around. He has been awarded the 2010 Prince Philip designers prize ? which "recognises an outstanding contribution to UK business and society through design" ? for designing the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, in 1979 (though it didn't appear until 1982). The design would look familiar today: a clamshell in which the screen folds flat onto the keyboard. It didn't have a hard drive or floppy drive; those had to be attached. But as a testament to its ruggedness Moggridge's design made it into space ? it was used on the Space Shuttle ? as well as into the hands of US special forces.
The fact that he was the brains behind the form factor that is now so prevalent illustrates Britain's strength in industrial design. After all Jonathan Ive, the head of design at Apple, is British too, responsible for iconic designs such as the first iMac in 1997 ? which pushed forward the manufacture of large coloured translucent plastics ? and the iPod and iPad. (Of Apple's 14 designers, six are British and only one American.)
Moggridge's ideas follow in a line from the DynaBook, a theoretical design by Alan Kay at Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in 1968. That looked unlike a desktop; it was much more like a laptop. Moggridge, the co-founder in the early 1990s of the seminal design agency IDEO, was able to give ideas like that real form, through his expertise in industrial design: he credits it with awakening his enduring fascination in "interaction design", which looks at how users interact with both the hardware and the software that they're using ? seeing the two as integral, not separate.
What, however, is the future for laptops? Although desktop and laptop computers still sell in their tens of millions, there's a new rival emerging. It's the tablet: "It's a PC that is virtually without limits," as one famous name in technology said of them. "Within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."
That prediction was made in November 2001, not November 2010, and was made by Bill Gates rather than Steve Jobs. Even so, the rapid growth of tablet sales, and the number of them that have appeared or been slated to appear (currently roughly 30, ranging from the plethora of 7in tablets running Google's Android phone operating system up to the 14in double-screened Kno tablets aimed at students in the US) suggest they will soon rival desktops in their ubiquity. Apple is on course to sell about 10 million iPads this year, and as rivals pile in the category is expanding fast ? at the expense, apparently, of the little "netbooks" that zoomed in popularity a couple of years ago. Laptops, like desktops, might never die ? but they might be superseded, like desktops, by easy-to-carry, easy-to-share tablets.
For Moggridge, it won't matter: he has moved on now to become director of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Wherever computing goes next, it will probably end up under his gaze.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/14/bill-moggridge-laptop-design-prize
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