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Charles Leadbeater just finished his book We-Think. And for it’s start, he put out this video in youtube questioning the crowd about the challenges of today’s sharing culture.

well, I think that the days of the lonely scientist are gone. Today, initiating conversations and sharing ideas is the a fundamental task in order to solve the complex problems that we face today.

Letsevo was started with the philosophy that there is a great power in open collaboration, and that great products can be achieved through an open interaction between people with different backgrounds. As a product designer, I have the power to visualize products and new uses of technologies. Designers can even go a little bit further and build rough prototypes of them. But in product Design, most of the times you need a lot of help implementing ideas, testing, taking them to production and finally market insertion. I think that sharing ideas and experiences on all of the development stages provide a chance for people who know better to influence and to collaborate in the design of products.

That is one of the very first ideas behind Letsevo, finding people with similar dreams to help bringing them to reality.

Now, how do you earn a living when everybody is sharing their ideas?

Letsevo thinks there has to be a balance on what you share and what sell. For example: Participating on the development of the open source operational system Linux, gives programmers the possibility to show off their skills and gain recognition in their field. Linux was created by a crowd of collaborators and it is free to download and to use it. But if you want to have support on implementing Linux in your company, you pay companies like Redhat to help you setting up everything right.

Sharing ideas in communities like Linux is a way of most people to start their professional life nowadays, gather experience, gain reputation in their field. Often, a lot of the people ho collaborate in projects like Linux are offered great jobs at companies like Microsoft, IBM or Google.

I really don’t know yet if something like that could be applied in product design, everything here at Letsevo is still really experimental. All we know is that sharing is fun and help ourselves achieve higher dreams.

The conversation has started, what do you think?

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!

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 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

Today I am happy to write about 3dVia Shape 3d software and its social network platform which are initiatives of Dassault Systemes, the french firm responsible for the famous Design and engineering software: Solidworks.

Dassaut systemes is aiming to grasp the user-generated design wave by enabling everyone to create 3d Modells and share them in their platform just like you do with your pictures by flickr. So at www.3dvia.com anyone can login and start creating, sharing and rating each others design.

Google started ahead with its Sketchup software and 3dWarehouse but deliver very low-quality graphics and accuracy to build real stuff with it. I found it so bad I didn’t even boder writing about it here in Letsevo. Now 3dvia Shape sofware, seems to have has a lot more graphic power than google`s software. One thing that bodered me is that even dough you can see amazing models made by some users in their gallery, I can seem to imagine that they were build right inside of the program. I may be wrong but by looking at the avaiable tutorials in their website it seems like their software still lack a lot of the building tools most of the product design software have (Sweep along rail, Lofts, fillets….) meaning you cannot build complex shapes right away. Lets hope they increment it right away.

But what really sets 3dvia apart from google is it´s nice social network features where users can build profiles and embed 3d models as widgets in other websites just like youtube. You still need to download a plugin to view it but it is awesome.

Download the player and check the following out:

This guy build a sweet bmx bike!! That could be the user of the future saying: look! BRAND, this is how I want my product, are you going to ignore me? I think this is going to be awesome, this platform can serve as place to exchange files with other designers, engineers and to also show the users what is beeing done and have there comments write on the spot!

Now check this video Dassaut Systemes made:

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtZxE8C6aik

Sweet huhn? Now in my opnion its is going to be a long way for it to be reallity, but I have the feeling they are in the right track.

My two hints for Dassaut Systemes are:

1.Let people import and export geometrical data from other 3d sofwares like .iges, .dwg, .3dm ( don´t try to be like sony and the blue-ray disc!!!) If you let us use your software to read existing data than design companies are going to take this serious. Until then it will be only internet hype not a social revolution.

2.If you want to be really a tool for the product design STARTUP companies in the the collaboration era, think wiki or basecamp for product design: 3d files with construction history and the ability to handle multiple layers. To help my point picture this scenario. I want to build an electric bike and I am only a designer. I have some nice design ideas and I find in the internet a couple companies that procuce batteries, other companies produce motors….other build suspension forks…I call them up and invite them for a project hosted at your site and we all start uploadings components in to one file having the power to collaborate in real time! How cool would that be!? Content Central and e-drawings for the masses?

Give us the tools and we are gonna build stuff you could never imagine of! Yeah.

Another nice story about 3Dvia

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

Charles Leadbeater’s speech at TED about creative collaboration and user generated innovation, gives us a brilliant overview about how innovation is more and more coming from passionate users other than from closed laboratories inside of big companies R&D departments.

Anyone interested in the influence of this thoughts in new kinds of businesses should definitely watch it over and over again. Charles Leadbeater, Lets Evo loves you. Thank you.

Link to Video
More About Charles Leadbeater

Thanks Sebastian “Sebi” Schulz for sending me the link of the All Things Digital Conference Website where I found this! Collaboration rules. (Sebi used Delicious, and Tagged For:Henrique to send me this Link)

I just could not not participate….

This is my concept. It came from a photo I took in 2003 when I first got in Germany. As a Brazilian, I was amazed by the aesthetic of trees during the hard winter when all the leafs fall. The “greener” look of the naked branches was my way of illustrating the life that resists in them during the cold.
Go do your own design or participate on the voting

Its been a long time since I started working on this but like y’all know, everything has its time to come to life. I have been working hard the last weeks to finish EVO’s newest skateboard.

The deck is 83cm long and is a mix of an old school skateboard and a Longboard. It’s aimed for riding with ease around town but still allow some tricks here and there. It was build using 7 layers of 1,5 mm Canadian Ahorn Plywood pressed together at exactly 27,69 Tons/cm² using epoxy resin.

Its griptape design was inspired by the leaf’s Gestalt. After drawing the desired shape and printing it out, a lot of time was invested to cut and apply the separate peaces of the grip on the deck. I image how difficult it might be to produce this in large scale but until I find a engineer to come up with better solution I will be cutting and pasting the old school way.

Special thanks should be given to Teimaz from Azita Skateshop who kindly lent me wheels,trucks,bearings for the photos.

One thing is certain about personalization of products:

once brands give users freedom to influence in design decisions that are deeper than changing the colors of their shoe laces, they risk losing brand identity which no big company is willing to do.

And at the forum nobody mentioned projects like Instructables, a plattform that let users submit instructions for problems….now that’s for me much more personal. Ok, I must say that it is also not really Design (or is it?). I think something is missing out there, maybe we are going to see the emergence of new kinds of Brands, who knows.
While in Munich I got to meet Sebastian Schulz, a friend from the HfG Offenbach Design School , which is currently doing an internship at BMW in Munich. We talked a little bit about innovation networks and their potential to guide companies through changes in user needs and to serve as a co-design platform for products to be designed by companies and users. He is preparing himself for a graduation project in this subject. He also showed me this amazing video about the web 2.0 dynamic content capabilities which made my mind snap.

Maybe this “hypertext culture” can actually transform our way of coming up to solutions for real-life design problems. Look at Wikipedia and its interrelationships of ideas that constantly Grow and are modified by users in real time….could we think of something like Wikipedia outside of the software world? a branded instructables? I just want to live to see what happens.

Link to Video

video

It has been a while since the last time I wrote something here at Lets-evo blog. Well, I apologize for that. The year is starting write now for the blogger “me”. I have been spending a lot of time to catch up with my projects since I came back to Germany after a 3 month period in Rio de Janeiro. I went to Rio for the Design Workshop at ESDI and stayed a bit longer in order to fix some parts of my body that weren’t functioning as they should be =). I have had 11 shoulder dislocations since I am 15 years old. The last one beeing in August 2006 so I decided to have my shoulder operated close to my family. It was the second operation I had in the right shoulder, and luckily the last. Maybe I put the operation video in Youtube for you to check (it is just like in the workshop….just smaller tools).

My wishes for 2007….well, I didn’t ask anything else other than having peace with my shoulder ’cause I will not erase sport from my life at the age of 25. Thinking more globally, 2007 is there, giving us the opportunity to keep searching for what motivates us and to change some stuff that we, as a society aren’t still managing to control: pollution, wars, racism, consume culture and injustice. In 2007 lets follow our hearts without forgetting the ones next to us.

A good year for everybody! Peace.

]]> http://www.lets-evo.net/blog/2007/01/24/lets-2007/feed/ 0 http://www.lets-evo.net/blog/2006/12/09/first-lets-evo-open-product-development-project/ http://www.lets-evo.net/blog/2006/12/09/first-lets-evo-open-product-development-project/#comments Sat, 09 Dec 2006 03:31:06 +0000 Henrique Monnerat http://www.lets-evo.net/?p=132
It’s official, Fibra Design Sustentável and Lets-Evo start a virtual development blog for the development of a sustainable skateboard. The goal of the platform is to shorten the innovation cycle through at dynamic open environment where Designers, Artists, Engineers, Producers and users interact in order to build a better product.

Project Page

I’m gonna talk about Bionics and Design at Museu da Vida next week and would like to invite all of you. I will talk specifically about 2 subjects inside the field of Bionics.

First I will show the Neptuno Submarine project which was my graduation/postgraduation project at the School of Arts and Design Offenbach, Germany together with Festo AG. In this part I will talk about fish propulsion and the adaptation of its functioning principle to a realistic design concept of a research submarine and show the following development of prototypes of its propulsion system.

Secondly I will be talking about “nastic movements” in plants and its possible uses in product constructions there are going to vary in shape (shape morphing). Plants can´t run anywhere when the weather conditions change so they have developed ways of reacting to changes (nastic moviments) in order to survive. I will show movies, diagrams of nastic structures as well as developments of its uses in technology.

Tema em Portugues (portuguese version)

His latest film Smooth Operations, done together with Nicholas Parker, was shown yesterday at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in Rio, showing some nice snowboard and downhil skate action. Make sure to check his other films at youtube. Just type “triboaventura”.

I wish I have met him before cause we have lots of common interests, but I am sure we are going to start collaborating soon on some new projects.

More about this camera here

Link to Video

Remember when mom used to say, kid! How many times do I have to tell you not to play with fire!!! yeahh I remember. And in Brazil, moms also say that kids that play with fire pee in bed much more than normal kids. I never met the mom of this rocket guy but I am sure he didn´t listen to her.

Sorry to all the moms out there but wouldn’t it be nice to build an opensource rocket bike? or at least learn How to. I don´t know a thing about rockets but I know a lot about bikes, I also know some crazy friends (the Alltrack Bicycles Crew) that would love to ride this thing. The test track would be at Ipanema Beach, at a sunday afternoon when the road is open for pedestrians. But we would need to find this guy to share his knowledge, we would also need ideas for potencial sponsors (administrators);we would need a camera for documentation (film makers, journalists); a music band for the video soundtrack and DJ for the release party. Ok, before the party, we must build this bike.

Unfortunately I wouldn´t be able to build a rocket bike like this myself (at least not without giving up my job as a designer to study a lot about rockets) but I am sure there are many out there that could help me. In order to build this things with this complexity we should start thinking of a platform that would enpower different people to work in the same project, find a way to share knowledge in real time, sharing 3D files, spreadsheets, drawings etc., people working non-centralized in small subjects of the problem, sharing experiences to achieve one goal. In a realtime product development platform, this could happen not just with rocket bikes, but with any complex product. Its about communicating to evolute, to go further. So the list of things we need is definitely far from being complete but I think one thing is certain, we need to collaborate to build the products of our future. Peace.

Link to Video

Open source thinking and user generated content are changing the way business models are planned. The simplicity of softwares to edit photo, music and film has empowered common people to create and share creativity. The DIY (Do It Yourself) economy is challenging product development with the growing need for user costomization (much simpler in the software world). Although the big names of the Industry may not want users to influence their designs, users are going design their your own products with the help of free CAD software and desktopfabrication.

In Product development sharing files, like .MP3, may well become as popular as dowloading the last U2 hit. Imagine if you could design your next sunglasses and share it with your friends that would download it and print on the corner’s copy shop 3D printer. Imagine more complex ideas where you could share files with companies and engineers that would collaborate with you making your dream product!

Looking forward to it I am glad to point you to this list of Free CAD (Computer-aided Design) Programs put up by the folks of Freebyte. With a mix of totally free softwares and time-trial CAD software demos. Still most of them are too complicated to mastered by the majority of the crowd but it is already a start.

One thing to think about is how today’s companies will have to adapt for this coming situation. If they are going to find ways of exchanging knowledge with its “design users” giving rewards for user generated design like bonus at buys, free products, or if they are going to ignore it.

Thanks Freebyte!

We are all artists, aren´t we? Our collaborating artist Voe (actually, that’s the artist “me”), has just created a Flickr group for the Scan Heads Art Project. Everyone with a scanner or a near copy machine can participate. Just hit the scan button and let the artist inside of you do the rest. All your art pieces can be uploaded in a snap and shared for everyone to see.

If you haven’t already found the contemporary artist YOU, here is a chance to start.

I got a chance to be modified in an experiment made by my friend Jochen Leinberger, who wrote a small program that reads each pixel of and image and transforms it into a geometry shape (in this case, a sphere) and scales it in coorelation to its color value. Its similar of what a photoshop filter does, the diference is that his program can generate a vector graphic file (.SVG) of the result which can than be endlessly scaled and even be sent to a CNC mill Machine.

Jochen is experimenting with scientific phenomens, digital processes and aestetics questioning the frontiers of algorithims and the real world.

And I am trying to convince him to create some algorithim skateboard graphics. Until that happens, I suggest everyone interested to keep track of his thoughts on his website Explorative Environments

Program Screenshot

The new version has a nice Category Feature (Tags) which is going to help you find specific things I talked about in our blog session. Every

post from version 1.0 is here accept for the videos on from the Skateboard Test we did with the University of Clausthal (comming Soon).
Unfortunately the Dates of the past “Posts” and its “Coments” don´t represent the truth anymore. But everything else was brought back!

Enjoy!

Henrique Monnerat

This is my professor Dieter Mankau working on one of his patents. In this case his was building a bridge system between skis in order to help stabilize the ride and to allow better carving. He has built several modells for HEAD which sends every now and them new material for him to play with. Much of the knowledge that I am using for new skateboards comes from long conversations during my studies in the School of Design Hfg_Offenbach. I will try to show more stuff from him here in the future.

Dieter Mankau at the Hfg_website

I stitched together a view of the skateramp built at the Bright. More photos from last weekend can be seen at the Lets-evo Group on Flickr.

Tomorrow begins here in Frankfurt the Bright Skateboard Tradeshow. Business is going to be done between the walls of the old police building. Other than making money you can expect some great boarding during the 3 days of the fair. Earlier this year, at the Winter version of the Bright, a sick bowl with an insane wallride over the main door was built inside the building. This year there is going to be an additional surprise, a rollercoaster like skatepark at the back yard promising some sweet action. I will try to post some pics of the event so check back next week for that.

Until then, keep lovin’ .

For those who don´t know yet how the curvature in a skateboard is achieved here is a brief example how a board comes to its shape.

Basically a skateboard is made from an uneven (7,9,11) number of wood layers laid between two CNC molds (Forms) that hold the positive and the negative side of the board’s curvature. When laying the wood layers, it is important to pay attention to the direction of the woodfibers making sure the they are always 90° in relationship to the top and bottom layers, this ensures a great deal of stability. Between each wood layer comes a small amount of epoxy resin evenly distributed. After giving them 18 hours of pressure we have strong skateboard curvature ready to be cut.

Wouldn´t it be nice if you could get to a new city and download to your mobile every information about the best skateboard spots in town, If you like to ride a skateboard, you know what I mean. looking foward to that I started the “Lets-Evo Skateboard Areas Rio de Janeiro” at the google earth´s community page hoping that it grows with new spots every now and then.

I hope many of you are not really into this whole robot hype. Technology is leading us to a future where we are going walk into a company or a fair and be received by a machine that is suposed to help us find our way and give us the atention needed.

Just like these call systems that already drive us nuts when all we really want is a human beeing to pick up the phone, Robots are really going to make our lives miserable. And then there is this whole facination with robots playing bad soccer at the “Robot Cup” etc…

The only cool use I can think for a robot is the one of flying around me and my friends while we ride our bikes, skateboards, snowboards, kites…. shooting cool videos at insane perspectives. I am starting to gather information about institutes that are researching about microflying robots, maybe some of us will get together for the design of one.

The first thing I would recommend to take a look ist the Delfly Project from the Technical University Delft. Other examples are welcomed.

I am working on a form for a new downhill skateboard with double curvature that should hit the streets in a couple of weeks. I am working on it in my free time and hope to get it ready for my next trip back home in Brasil so it can be tested by Rio´s finest downhill riders.

After leaving the CNC Mill machine I applied to the forms a layer of “grundierung” ( I donn´t know the name of this thing English – something that makes MDF waterproof) and than a layer “spritz Harz” (Resin) and than sanded it to make the surface even. The board is going to be 1,3 meters long and is intended for easy carving down steep streets like the Vista Chinesa Downhill in Rio de Janeiro. Test riders are welcome.I am going to be there from the 2nd until the 12th of October. Just send an email.

The 60 pages of the results alog with videos are going to be available soon at the project´s page.

Thank you Frank!

Last year we received a beautiful carbon skateboard deck from a material research institute in the University of Clausthal in Germany. Our job was to test it and say what we think of the new board because those guys from the institute are good in making things light, but they don´t know nothing about riding boards! The riders: Nico Hopp, Lars Mayer, Simon Schlör and myself have had lots of fun helping them understanding what was good and what could be better in the board. We made a nice video that was send to the university researchers with images of the board in action together with each riders toughts. The video will be posted soon here in Lets Evo Blog.