Vale a pena prestar a atenção na helmetcam giratória que faz imagens alucinantes! quem consegue descobrir como foi produzida?

Valeu Peter pelo vídeo! Feliz Natal galera!

Junte geração facebook com impressoras 3D, adicione um pouco de habilidades de projeto e o que teremos!? Uma explosão de produtos e soluções personalizadas para dentro e fora de casa!

Essa bela animação do pessoal da Nueveojos em Barcelona descreve um pouco desse cenário futurístico mas muito mais próximo do que a gente imagina.

Evolução para revolução já dizia Letsevo Elwin!

A foto acima é de Steve Rhodes, e mostra um dos resultados do evento Park(ing) Day que mobilizou algumas cidades do mundo a respeito da reapropriação dos locais destinados a estacionamento.

Isso me dá uma vontade de organizar um novo projeto na plataforma…seria assim, pessoas colocam imagens de pontos da cidade que merecem melhoria, outros comentam deixando idéias e até desenhos. Empresários e organizações observam e tem a chance de apoiar a iniciativa para quem sabe se tornar realidade!

Design Coletivo das cidades! quem se anima?

Mais sobre Urbanismo DIY e o Park(ing) Day aqui

Clique na imagem para saber mais sobre o projeto e sobre a apresentação.

Será que vale a pena abrir o desenvolvimento de um produto publicando arquivos de design e correr o risco de ser copiado? Será que é possível ganhar dinheiro dividindo com outras pessoas informações do desenho de seu produto? A indústria de Hardware Livre (Open Source Harware) é hoje bombardeada por este questionamento.

O pessoal da Adafruit, uma das empresas pioneras neste mercado, realizou uma pesquisa para sondar o escopo dessa nova indústria e nos mostra que esta já gera milhões de dólares. Os dados foram apresentados no último Foo Camp e trazem grandes esperanças para iniciativas como a LETSEVO que esperam operar nesse universo.

Link para a apresentação

Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.

The conversation around the concept of Open Design is starting to pick up momentum, last week at the Betahaus in Berlin, a workshop was organized during the Social Media Week Berlin 2010 to discuss the topic among designers.

The documentary: Delivered in Beta was shot during the workshop and exposes some of the ideas talked about there.

As an open design platform, we are happy to see the start of a more broader conversation on the topic hoping that this wave of attention will help us achieve greater success in realizing our design ideas.

via SwissMiss and @hipertipo

Martin Wenzel created this sculptural wooden bar in Rio de Janeiro. He came up this work for the opening of the Studio Antonia Rodrigues and the launch of the 6th issue of Miroir, the young design and fashion magazine published by Priscila Miranda.

I have long watched his experiments with wood while together at the design school in Germany, and this new work is just one of the signs that his visit to Brazil won’t be left unseen.

Martin Wenzel Website

A step-by-step instruction guide of our DIY Skateboard project is up on the project’s page.

Hello! Welcome to my first post here. When I told Henrique that I was going to this event, he suggested I write a post for the site and share some of what I had experienced.  So here it is….

I had the pleasure of going to Friedrichshafen this year to attend three days of the Eurobike international bicycle trade show.  It was absolutely mind-boggling the size of this thing.  Tens of thousands of bikes in about 12 football field sized exhibition halls.  It took me three days of seven hours per day to see every booth, and I’m sure I missed a lot of what the show had to offer.  The big story this time was the rise of electric bikes.  There were two different test tracks where you could try any of the models from several dozen manufacturers.  This part of the industry is huge, and growing.  Fixed gear bikes are also all the rage, and everyone seems to have one.  There were a few notable bikes and accessories that I thought would be appropriate for Letsevo, so check out the pictures (and don’t forget to read the descriptions below the pictures) in the gallery to get a feel of where we’ve gotten to in this crazy cycling world.

[View with PicLens]

Last Month I was back in Rio de Janeiro, 3 weeks of a mix of relaxing moments with friends and important meetings. While there, I remembered that when I was still in University, one of my good friends Daniel Xveid would always remind me that one day, I would have to design some crazy lamp for his house. So, there I went, looking for all I needed to build a Light DIYstric Lamp to surprise him.

Now the DIYstric Lamp returns to it’s birth place, Rio de Janeiro. Daniel, hope you enjoy it!

More photos and Step by Step instructions on how to build one can be found here.

Finding the Right FORM

Looking at nature for the best Form for a fin propelled submarine can be quite overwhelming at first. Trying to define a specific fin shape for the Neptuno Submarine was no easy task giving into to account the HUGE number of different forms and configurations marine creatures have. Thanks to biology research, a lot has been written on this subject.

Form Specialization – (Illustration: A.Kesel 1997 adapted from P.Webb 1984)

Every maritime biological being has passed through various stages of adaptation in the course of its evolution. Thus optimization to different living conditions eventually led to various forms and characteristics. This illustration from Prof. Dr. A. Kesel shows a comparison chart between fish shapes and their behavior characteristics (read strenghts). On the top we see fishes who can accelerate very quickly,on the left fishes which can maintain very high speeds for long distances and on the right of the chart, fishes that can maneuver very precisely.

How many Fins?

When we look closer to a fish, we see that there are many different fins, and that each one of them has a different function. This seems quite obvious, but understanding their functions can bring key insights for design decisions for future vessels.

Tail Fin: Is the mail propeller for a fish, It has also the function of controlling the direction of the swim.
Pectoral Fin: In most of the fishes, pectoral fins help them control their level (maneuvering up and down) but some coral reef fish have very strong pectoral fins that act as the main propulsion system (i.e. Box Fish).
Dorsal Fin:The Dorsal fin acts like a stability aid, keeping the body from oscillating to much when accelerating.
Pelvic Fin:This fin act like an hydrodynamic parachute help fish to brake and slow down.
Anal Fin:the Anal fin has the same function as the dorsal fin, it is there to keep the ride stable.

Kinematics

the correlation of form and function is clear as you look deeply in to the matter, but there is also one other aspect the greatly influence the performance of swimming, its their body movement.

Most importantly, there is a distinction between the actuating angle of the movements between fish and aquatic mammals. Probably because of their need to come back to the surface for air, aquatic mammals have their fin swinging in the vertical plane, making them more agile in that case. Fish have their bodies swinging in the horizontal plane (there are exceptions like the Plaicefish).

What also varies a lot between species, is the amount of body which swing and the type of curvature that it makes. Basically there are fish that use almost the whole body, and there movement is characterized by a wave that travels through the whole body. Which is often called ondulating movement. One example of this kind of kinematics is found by the eel. What is interesting in these kind of fish is the ability to switch the curve direction of their body movement to swim backwards. These fish are very precise in maneuvering but aren’t that efficient when it comes to speed.
On the other hand, Fish like the Tuna, can achieve enormous speeds underwater (up to almost 100 km/h), by having a partial undulating movement of their bodies which on the end of each swing cause a oscillating movement of the tip of their fin (thus called sub-undulating). Their highly hydrodynamic bodies and stiff/narrow fins make up the perfect combination of high speed swimming for long distances in the many situations when it has to swim in open water looking for food.
By contrast, some fish leaving in the narrow environments like coral reefs have the necessity to maneuver very precisely in very small paths, some times even swim backwards. The box fish for example, uses mainly their pectoral fins for propulsion leaving there caudal fins almost exclusively for steering, there fin Oscillate from side to side, almost as if it were pivoted in one point.

Flexibility X Stiffness

Researchers of the MIT working on this subject of flexible fin propellers have come to many achievements regarding the developments towards a more efficient and quite way of propelling vessels underwater. Their Robotuna project served as a platform for testing different functional aspects aroung the theme.

One particular study caught my attention, which was the study from Michael S. Triantafyllou, Alexandra H. Techet, and Franz S. Hover, entitled: Review of Experimental Work in Biomimetic Foils*. This study tell us a bit about the effects of stiffness in the efficiency of such propulsion systems, drawing the conclusion, that with every different swing frequency/amplitude ratio, a specific stiffness of the fin would bring the best results regarding the consumption of energy. This suggested that there was another variable to be taken into account when designing flexible fin propulsion systems, which is the flexibility of the body of the submarine. * IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 29, NO. 3, JULY 2004

Wraping it up for now

These were some of the aspects that I considered most important and to keep in mind during the next phase, the conceptual phase. On the next post I will be writing about the design strategies I developed after this analysis and I will also tell a bit about the festo pneumatic muscle technology which I used as starting point for my proposal.

The Neptuno Submarine Concept submarine was my graduation project at the School of Arts and Design in Offenbach, Germany. I time where the letsevo website was not yet existent. It was first presented in the 17 of February of 2005. My supervisors for this project were: my great mentor Prof. Dieter Mankau (HfG Offenbach) and Dr. -Ing. Robert Mayr. The work was sponsored by the german automatization company Festo AG, which had interest in applications for there Pneumatic Muscle Technology.

Goal of the project:
Design a submarine that makes use of new developments in maritime propulsion research, more specifically: Flexible Fin propulsion (read: Fish Propulsion). Learn from what research was telling us about flexible fin propulsion and translate that in to a design of a two person research submarine propelled only, by the means of such propulsion system.

Startpoint at that time (Jun 2004) were research results from the MIT Robotuna (2000), and the “Forelle Flossenantrieb” from the university of Saarland, Germany (1995) along with many scientific articles on the subject from brilliant minds like W. Nachtigall, R. Blickham and Dr. A. Kesel on the great Biona Report.

Neptuno Submarine, 2005, HfG Offenbach. Design: Henrique Monnerat

In the next days, I will we writing a series of posts to explain in detail how I came to this design and what happened after my graduation, when I received a full scholarship from Festo AG to develop a working model of the propulsion system conceptualized for the Neptuno Submarine in form of a post graduation study.

Stay tuned!

If it looks as awesome as the amazingly crafted C-Thru Bike from BME, I am afraid it does.

The C-thru road frame is made from solid carbon rods carefully bonded together into its geometry. BME is the effort of the Slovakian engineer Brano Meres who has been experimenting among other things, with bamboo/carbon fiber constructions.

Now what would happen if we added a little bit of biology’s intelligence to Brano Meres’ construction?
Lets say, some adaptive design strategies regarding the spacing and dimension of the carbon rods….what do you think?

Nature puts material only where its needed… so there is a variation in the density of structures, always. Are the forces equal along the top tube of a Road Bike? If not…There could be some generative design patterns being applied to the construction defining its shape in relationship to the forces acting upon it…

Steffen R? What do you think? Ansys meets Generative Components meets Bike frame?

Give it up for Brano Meres. Amazing work, congratulations!

The video, part of the website The story of Stuff,aims to expose the inner workings of consumer culture and clarify the dangers of not seeing the bigger picture when it comes to ecology. Story of stuff is a short but powerful video on what I like to call the ecology of products. Unlike many of the videos and manifestations “pro” environment, Story of stuff puts consumer culture as part of the problem, bringing interesting insights to the Eco-Dilemma. The video is 20 minutes long and it is a definitely “must see” for everyone on board of our planet.

After watching the video and thinking about my role as a designer, I do fear of my work feeding up this system of consumption even more. But as a romantic idealistic dude, I dream of the time where create, hack and modify will be the words on the streets, a time when people remix more than buy. When this day comes you will know we have moved from the “you are what you buy society” to the “you are what you make or modify society”.

Do you think I am going too far on this? well take 3 minutes to read this great post at the ponoko blog about the GENERATION C ( “C” standing for digitaly created content) and you will maybe start to believe that this dream isn`t as far as we think.

Lets Evo.

Source:

A great blog post about Story of Stuff explains the motivations of the project.
The Story of Stuff video can also be seen in chapters on a youtube channel.

I started out by drawing the side view line and then extruded them to give some volume. After photoshoping a EVO skateboards logo to one off my wood texture files I was prepared to give this ramp a unique look. Pretty simple and not much of novelty in this. Applying the textures was pretty easy so was scaling and rotating it to match the scale of the Ramp. After being pleased how it looked, I just hit the Publish button and I was taken to their website where I could fill some details about the 3d model I was uploading. You can choose publish your model for everyone or to keep it private which means only you or who you want to show/give can see/download (this is nice if you want to keep it hidden before you have everything build or even if you want to collaborate in top secret style with other people) You can set a creative commons license and tags to make your model easily searchable. The modell is added to your profile page and can be at any given time edited again.

Here is a link to a screenshot of the 3d ramp in 3dvia shape

Everything is still pretty ruff, there isn’t much accuracy in building as a product designer would like.Lets hope Dassaut systemes, responsible for the software bring some functionality to the game. I think it only then it could be an awesome tool for collaboration projects like the ecosk8 project that has been happening at Lets Evo since 2006.

Some questions to start a discussion about the impact of such tools into the design process:

What benefits could it bring to companies?
Are user really motivated to participate?
Will 3dvia Shape develop itself into a tool for designers and engineers and users to communicate in real products?
Are we designers going to get used to interacting so early with users about design decisions?

Only time will tell.

Enjoy the 3D ramp!

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!

The idea is simple: Go to the project page, Download the DIY Skateboard Design PDF, Print it out, stick them together over any rest of wood to be recycled, cut, put on some wheels and enjoy the ride.

If you want make your own design, Download the DIY Skateboard Blank PDF (90cm long) and make it happen.

I would love to see some of your creations, so send a picture if you are proud of what you made.

Step by step instructions of the building process can be found here.

Blogging about is my way of saying thank you! for those who made it available.

Designers and Architects, check it out! and If you like it…say HI.

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

Today is the last day of the most important event of the industry calendar, the HMI 2007, which happens every year in Hannover, Germany. There, companies, research intitutes and universities show their lastest developments in technology. The HfG Offenbach Design School participated once again with the supervision of Professor Dieter Mankau.

The project I have been working on since August 2006 together with Dr. Deane Harder from the Plant Biomechanics Group of the University of Freiburg and Dr. Markus Milwich from ITV Denkendorf – Institute for Textile and Fibre Research Denkendorf was presented at the Bionik – engineering powered by nature booth. Done in collaboration with Rittal GmbH & Co. KG, the project concerned the development of new shock absorbing concept for a transport pallet used for transporting overseas sensible products like huge computer servers.

Unlike other years, the Research & Technology Hall showed fewer breakthroughs in technology as last year. One thing to notice is that there isn’t yet much of a communication between engineers and designers in order to present prototypes of technologies closer to reality. Designers can play an important roll inside a research team because of their ability to foresee applications of technologies and to communicate speciall caracteristics of a future product through design. Still, most of the research works lack the ability to communicate what are they meant for mainly because of the absence of a product designer.Best of Hannover Industry Fair 2007

why worry about the fashion industry when you can be it. lets Gucci

Meet Cut and Paste. Like two MCs at a Rap battle, two designers battle live in front of the crowd drinking beer and enjoining the show.

Shoud we call them DCs?

click the image to check the video

Via Cool hunting

the mother wants it to be called “love at first light” but the father would prefer something like “blackout”

wanna help? leave a suggestion

wanna take her home? send an email.

Professor Dieter Mankau, Professor Petra Kellner and myself are going to be discussing the implications of transformable structures in product design together with German and Brazilian Students.

The workshop keywords:

light; transformable; minimum; organic surfaces; membrane; self supporting; self stabilizing; sculptural; temporary; movable and free form

The Design workshop flickr group was created to archive the research done by the students along with the progress and results. there already many great images around the theme of the workshop, is worth a visit.