Today is the offcial start of the e.Moped Design Project. After having talked to some friends about Letsevo’s plans to start a open source project of an electric scooter, the wishes have finally come to reality.

I spent a a couple of hours programming and setting up the space for this project here at Letsevo.

Colaborators are wanted, we need engineers, electrical mechanics, motor developers, test riders, designers….any one wanting to evolve this idea further.

I know this a pretty daring task, to build such a vehicle from scratch. But for me, the wish of some day, be cruising around the neighborhoods on what we built, is much greater than the fear of failling. Not to mention having in the end, collaborated for more clean ways of transporting ourselfs around our planet!

So Let the journey begin!

This next article seems to Letsevo as a great mark in the collaborative design process. Wikitecture, as the folks from the Wikitecture Studio are calling it, is the first attempt I have seen in order to solve a long anticipated challenge of coming up with a programming language to build CAD constructions in a Wiki-like way. Wikitecture, as demonstrated in this youtube video, is a Secondlife scripting based project, to empower people to build Architecture together just like writing and editing Wikipedia entrances.

Check this youtube video to get the picture of what I am talking about.

This is the birth of a whole new ecology system of Industry, software companies and contributors collaborating to build great things!

Are companies going to ignore that we, the people, can help each other build all the products we want when technologies like Wikitecture become more mature?? Are companies going to react like majority of the Academic field reacted against Wikipedia, rejecting the fact that the wisdom of the crowd could in deed create a Encyclopedia from scratch?

I am a true believer that the things are going to change around here. Maybe it is time to start a new Letsevo project together!! A problem so complex that we would need the help of each other to achieve great results. Something around mobility, an collaborative electric moped? Something so modular, everyone could have its own customized electric moped to cruise around the neighborhood. Seems challenging to me, and fun to work on.

Can we get some companies to “Blend-in” their CAD parts for us to design around it? Batteries, Electric Motors, suspension forks, Disc brakes?

Can we get some brothers that share this dream? Marcello, Piers, Jochen, Nico, Christian, Basti, Peter, Gross….all the creative minds out there…Lets Wikit!?

There has been a lot of hype nowadays around concepts like crowd-sourcing and open-source and user-generated things. Lots of new business are been started and closed everyday trying to grasp this leap of todays way of working. But many of them haven’t achieved great success because business plans for such initiatives are still very difficult to succeed.

There are lots of problems regarding the rewards participation in product development, when in the end, someone is making money out of the ideas generated buy contributors around the globe.

Thats where Kluster gets my consideration and I will explain why. Kluster is a brand new company launched on 18th of February. It is a social network focussed on the development of products (which can be anything, from mp3 players and logos to events) which aims to reward every contribution to projects with some kind of monetary participation of the total value of the project.

More detais of how everything work can be seen in this Techcrunch story on Kluster.

Here is Kluster Demonstration Video in Youtube

I will tell a little bit of my impressions as I (of course) tryed it out.

First, I was amazed by how easy it is to setup everything and to start working on on going projects. The idea is that every project is broken down in phases which have a time stamp and a Reward is good to make complex tasks manageable. If you have an idea (called “spark”) you can contribute right away. If your “Sparks” follows to the next phase you automatically already wins participation on the gains on the end of the project. If you see a “Spark” from someone else, you can them suggest improvents “Amps”, which if are also aproved, you get participation points called “Watts”.

“Watts” are the currency inside of Kluster which can be changed in to Real money like the “Linden dollars” of second Life.

This is where Kluster starts to get real interest and where I think it has its potential. Once you have “watts” and you receive them by contributing to a project or to simply completing your profile you can “Invest” them on the Ideas “Sparks” of others, If there Sparks advance, you also get participation points “watts”. But if they don’t advance, you lose your invested “Watts”. This is a great incentive for people to vote on other ideas, and to vote well, because otherwise, you are using what you invested, your watts, your work hours.

In 45 minutes, I filled my profile, Contributed with “Sparks” for 3 Projects, Invested some “watts” in 3 other “Sparks” and Invited friends to participate and made 2670 “watts”.

Then I questioned my self, how many dollars does one “Watt” gives me?? Maybe some of you can answer this. I just don’t know.

But to finalize this post:

I think Kluster is an amazing experiment in this new world of wikinomics and hope to learn more about it as I try it. Will it survive the real world? Will it empower people to solve more problems? Will companies use it as a tool for developing products?

Here is a view of my profile page in Kluster

I would love to here some comments here at letsevo so I pass the MIC now. Peace

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me if I could tell him about design events that are happening here in Europe since he is planning to spend some months traveling around the old continent.

I sent him a couple of events that I know happen every year and pointed out to him Upcoming.org, one of those clever web 2.0 tools that does the task of organizing shared events from users around the globe. Think Flickr for your calendar, did some thing sparkle in your mind? Well, it sure sparkled in my mind that craves for exploring the potentials of such tools.

Why am I talking about a calendar tool here in letsevo? What does that have to do with product innovation?

Before starting to explain or respond to these two questions I would like you to please take a look at the Sidebar of the Letsevo website, the right sidebar. YEAH YEAH YEAH!!!

I am freaking glad to anounce the brand new Letsevo Collaboration Calendar! Powered by Upcoming.org and some mad artists/designers/scientists/cool-kids/inventors/whatever contributors that want to join the team of letsevo in the task of tagging every event surrounding technology, innovation, design.

Why am I doing this?
Because I want to share the events I know with the developing community and in this away help spreading the news about places to go when you want to exchange ideas, see new things and learn whats going on.
Why collaborativately?
Because I am positive that there are always people that know more then us, and when we do this together we have more power to achieve greater changes.
Why should you participate?
Because its fun to change the world, action by action. But in order to answer this question more accurately I will tell you a small story that happened to me:

I got to know that this year’s Volvo Sportsdesign award theme was EcoDesign through a post in the Design Blog “Design.com.br”, writen by Fernando Galdino. Without Fernando writing it about it in his blog, Letsevo would probably miss the deadline of the Award. We, from theEcosk8 project, sent immediately a prototype of our ecological Skateboard to the Award. And as I wrote here before, we were nominated for the Board equipment category!! If it wasn’t for Fernando Galdino and his love for sharing his knowledge, maybe it would have been too late for us to participate.

I hope Letsevo Calendar helps someone just like Fernando’s post helped the ecosk8 project!

Wanna participate? Logon to the Letsevo Calendar group inside of Upcoming.org and start to change the things around here. Lets evo!!!

It took a while to believe but we were there! Our Ecosk8 project was nominated for the board category of this years Volvo Sportsdesign Award. Among names like Salomon Snowboards, Arbor Snowboards and amazing projects like the Ecomoana Surfboard, our “Folha Seca” skateboard was the only chosen product from the southern hemisphere.

I had the chance, together with Pedro Themoteo and Bruno Temer from Fibra Design Sustentável
to go to this years Design Forum at ISPO to represent our project. Our open development project was chosen to participate in the “Elevator Pitch” where some of the best projects had 90 seconds to tell what they were about. Bruno represented our team and did an amazing job, finishing our message right on the last second bring a wild applause from the crowd.

Checkout some of the Pictures of the Event!!

At the end, Salomon Snowboards was awarded with the final prize with their “Sickstick” Bamboo Board. We got to know David Farcot and Henri Rançon from Salomon and were amazed by David Farcot’s words of support to our project while he spoke on stage. That was awesome! congratulations David and Henri.

Another great thing about the award is that it happens in the same time as the Volvo Design Forum – with this years main theme – Eco Design. Among the several lectures the forum organizes workshops that are really interesting to take part. I got the chance to participate on the “Build a chariot from Bamboo” workshop, organized by Nick Lobnitz and Bob Giddens from Carry Freedom. They have a sweet open-source project on bicycle racks and share their knowledge with everyone planning to build a bike rack.

More news about the ecosk8 project can be seen in almost real time at ecosk8’s open development website.

The Volvo Sportsdesign Award website