…William Kamkwamba. That’s right, if the DIY community had to pick a role model for this year, it has to be William Kamkwamba from Malawi, Africa. William built his family a electricity-producing windmill. And He was 14 when he did that. Using plans he found on a library book called “Using Energy” and modifying them to his needs, he managed to light up 4 light bulbs and to power 2 radios. Now with 19 he has plans to build a bigger one to pump water to a irrigation system for the whole village. How awesome is that?

His presentation at TED is worth getting inspired from.

Nice to mention is that William’s act was first published in a Malawian Blog which was read by TEDGlobal Conference Director Emeka Okafor who decided to invite him for this year’s conference. We see user innovation resolving local problems being spread in grassroots media (blogs) and inspiring global changes. Now William is also writing Blog.

People like him represent the new breed of entrepreneurs that are going to change things around here.

Is this the future or what?

Photos from: www.ted.com

I am experimenting with the concept of Widgets which lets you take peaces of webcode from PLACE A and embed in PLACE B on the web. A common use of it: An embed youtube video on a Blog makes use of an Widget to do it.

My interest on widgets grew by believing that with the simplification of communication technologies on the web, users are actively reshaping media and forming opinion, more than ever before.

With the growing need of customizing the experience on the internet, a number of services emerged to make it possible for people to personalize their web experience. Netvibes and Igoogle are two examples. With them you can make a personalized Start Page with all the relevant information to you (weather, to do lists, Email Inbox, you name it…)

What is the relevance for open design and development?

In a real-time integrated design platform, widgets enable the flow of information without having to rely on centralized decisions. Widgets make it possible to quickly spread ideas and to communicate project updates through whatever platform or website one wants.

Imagine you have a small bike factory in your garage, and you are developing a new concept for a bike frame and you have chosen to “Open Design it”, like we are doing in the ecosk8 project, you are openly talking about our ideas before they become reality. You came up with new geometry concept that’s going to sweep 3 seconds out every rider’s downhill time a the local Downhill track, and for this frame geometry the special aluminum tubing that can handle the curving of this new geometryis just not available any where you look. A widget could be used, containing information like that, to spread the word for you on different suppliers websites.

Now imagine this same small bike factory and it’s team of 3 Amateur riders. Every one of them having a blog or myspace page where they publish their latest results, photos and tips. Doing the widget thing you could easily embed their blogs onto your factory website and vice-versa. Boom! evolution.

Think of this now:

Every time the rider puts up on his blog, a picture of him, on the podium, wearing your brand’s t-shirt, the picture shines on your website, and he gets a reward! Sponsoring on demand?

Brand, your next factory bike video needs a new sound track!? Boom! Click Click and the whole myspace community knows about it!

Of course Letsevo Lab couldn’t sleep a night to figure out how to have its own Blog widget. I’m no programmer (I wish I was) but looking around I found out that there are some platforms that enable we, the people, to easily create a widget for your Blog. Here are some of them: SpringWidgets, WidgetBox and Yourminis.

Using Widgetbox I made what can be proudly called the Beta Version of Letsevo’s “wherever you want it to be” widget.

Letsevo Widget on my Netvibes Page

Lets Evo Widget on my Igoogle Page

Those brave enough to give it a shot can do so by going to: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/lets-evo-blog
and placing it where ever they want! Feedbacks are welcome!

My copy of Worldchanging – A user’s guide for the 21st century has just arrived! After randomly reading their Blog and being punched in the face by Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth I just felt I had to increase my sustainability level.

This massive 600 page book is a wonderful resource of sustainable examples gathered by the worldchanging blog community. Its 7 sections (stuff, shelter, cities, community, business, politics, planet) cover a wide range of applied ideas on sustainability from “water purification” to “spreading the power of café conversations” (two articles of the book)

The whole concept of small articles is just cool. This format is awesome, you don’t even have to read pages and pages in order to spice up your ecological charm. A quick read throughout one of the articles before that special date and you be sounding like a down to earth “worth a marriage” kind of dude. Could I convince you now?

Jokes aside, this book is an amazing resource and should be read by all of those citizens willing to make a change.

Got some eco strategies of your own you wanna share with? Favorite articles of the book people should know about? Write on.

link to this video

There is something evo about record breakers and because of that I have put up this list of videos from the world’s biggest skateboards. If you wanna help built the next biggest board, lets chat, but there will be no open source in here, it’s going to be top secret for the sake of competiton.

Have fun watching them!

Links to videos: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

When a first saw this two years ago I though it was just another internet “waist my time hype”. In deed it can actually fall into this category if you aren’t interested in how collective creation can be achieved. The fact is that Peter Edmunds’ Swarm Sketch it’s actually damn good example of the collective power of the internet.

SwarmSketch uses the concept of a drawing task to visualize the power of collective organization. It does so setting the rules into which collective intelligent can exist.

This is how it works:

Every week a randomly subject is chosen to become the Drawing task for the week. Every visitor can contribute with a new line to the sketch. Following that, the visitor can vote for the relevance of the lines of other visitors, giving a opacity level to them. The darkness of each line represents the average of other visitor’s votes. In this way visitors help to moderate the direction in which the drawing is going (self regulation). After a week or when the Sketch reaches 1000 lines, the final result is shown and a new is started.

The gallery of the project shows every subject that was collective sketched since the start of it in 2005. A nice animation from the beginning to the end of each sketch can be seen along with all statistics about it.

Swarm Sketch of a Squid – Image source: swarmsketch.com

visit SwarmSketch

After Adobe Acrobat 3D, which makes possible the visualization of complex 3D objects in .PDF format, Adobe is experimenting with the generation and ilumination of 3D objects wright inside of Photoshop.

With the help of Strata 3d(in) Plugins for Photoshop, displayed earlier this month in Photoshop World Conference in Las Vegas, Adobe is hoping to bridge the gap between the complex authoring world of 3D models and its palette of Products.

Plug-In Screenshot of a shoe 3D modell generated from a series of photographs of the real shoe

Functions like the generation of simple 3D modells and the generation of complex 3D modells (with textures!!) from photographs and the return of it as a 3d Layer into photoshop CS3 extended are all possible with this new plug-In suite. Once the modell is in a photoshop 3D layer, it can be rotated, iluminated and even exported as a Acrobat 3D file or a webpage. How sweet is that?

It seams a logical step for a company like Adobe, which has been claiming its key role in the digital creative market but hasn’t done much for us product designers. Strata seams to be a company of its own and I couldn’t find exactly how is the relationship between the two companies. Lets just hope that more and more 3D features come and maybe even a new Abode 3D Application.

If you want to take a look how these pluggins work visit the official Strada webpage and watch the video tutorials. If you have already tried it and want to share your toughts on it or your creations, send Lets Evo a Link, I will be happy to share it here.

Sources:
Adobe Keynote video at Photoshop World 2007 Las Vegas
Strata
CG Blog