The Nextfab and the Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer are planning a conference about Personal fabrication in Brazil in 2010, for that, they organized a survey to gather some information about people interested in attending/presenting at the conference. I suggest everyone interested in the subjects of Open Design, Fabing, Open Hardware and Manufacturing to contribute to the survey helping to bring an event like this to life.

Link to survey
NextFab
CIT – Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer

Many thanks to Massimo from Openp2pdesign for spreading the word!

I had a chance to spot 3 vary interesting electric  motorcycle concepts during my visit to the TU Delft for the Advanced Automotive Design Symposium. Unfortunately I do not have any information about these 3 concepts for now. I saw this models only when leaving the Aula and since I was one of the last, there was no one to tell me something about them.  I will get back to you as I get more info. I will maybe post all the pictures on a image research gallery I am planning for the e.Moped project.

Here are the photos of my visit to this year’s Hannover Industry Fair, Germany’s most important innovation event. I had an amazing time during my 2 day visit to the fair.

Under Highlights are the great work of my friends from the school of arts and Design in Offebach, some information on components and innovations on electric vehicles and a lot of new materials!

It took me more energy than I though, putting all the pictures and writing about them, I hope you enjoy it!

[View with PicLens]

Last week was Cut and Paste time in Amsterdam. During the whole evening, the battle was on at amsterdam’s most traditional club, Paradiso. Back in 2006 I briefly wrote about the Cut and Paste design tournament after seen a video done by the guys from Cool Hunting. Last Thursday I got the chance to see it live.

On 3 Design Categories: 2D Design, 3D Design and Motion Graphics, 4 designers battle each other in front of the crowd for the most WOWing images. Except for the Motion graphics category, the designers have 15 minutes for each assignment. The assignments range from creating an LP cover on the 2D category to the designing, well, sort of… lets say, visualizing a spacecraft on the 3D category. On the Motion graphics, the 4 contestants had to come up with a video on theme, “Show me the Money”. They had more time than the other categories (8 hours, finishing up on the end of the event) due to the complexity of working with large animation files etc…

On the first place of the 2D category, was Jordy van den Nieuwendijk, which came up with an amazing LP cover with the theme “change”, where he painted modified (scratched) versions of his face on the LP, leaving a “cut out” on the cover, which blended one of this faces to the cover, all in a nice rough cartoon style. The “runner up”, receiving the honors for the second place was from guess where, R-I-O D-E J-A-N-E-I-R-O B-R-A-S-I-L ! Yep, Representing! It was Martin Holzmeister, a graphic designer and VJ from Rio, who now lives and works in Amsterdam. He made a awesome intervention on the assignment “poster with the theme: Icon”, mixing the symbol of the city of amsterdam (the 3 X’s on top of each other) with the crossed arms done by supporters from the most famous soccer team in Brasil, Flamengo.

The 3D category left me wanting to join next year…I had an impression that most of the 3D Designers that were participating came actually from the character design scene rather than the industrial design scene, due to the software that they were using, Zbrush, Softimage and Maya, there was no one was using Nurbs modelers or parametric software. Industrial designers, step up!

The event was packed with people from the dutch design scene and was a blast to check. I definitely recommend!

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

I just particpated in my first Critical Mass Bike Ride. Here in Frankfurt, since last year, every first Sunday, more and more bikers meet at in front of the old opera house to reclaim their portion of the streets. The ride ended up at the Honsel Brücke where the Wheelzup Bike Film Festival was happening.

The Critical Mass movement, which started in 1992 in San Fracisco (1) is a way of protesting against the ever growing dominance of cars inside of big cities and celebrate the joy of riding. Today, the Critical Mass movement exists worldwide (2) and can attract as much as 5 thousand people like the one in August 2004 in New York (3).

In frankfurt, the critical mass movement has a website, but like in other cities, doesn’t represent any formal kind of organization. For example, during last weekend’s ride, I could see at the beginning of the ride, that there were a couple of guys blocking the traffic while the Mass pedaled the first street blocks. Suddenly I realized newcomers such as myself were already helping to set the new rules of the streets. Self organization?? yeah!!

The ride covered much of the downtown area of frankfurt and lasted some 2 and a half hours. Since the gathering in front of the Opera house until the end of the ride there was a clear feeling of joy and freedom. Well… the car drivers weren’t very happy….but who cares. Lets Ride!.

Best Photos of the ride….

Sources:

(1) http://critical-mass.info/

(2)http://www.critical-mass.org/

(3)http://www.stillweride.org/

A just posted my entry at the Sigg Design Contest. All you creative junkies should do the same. Simply download the template and let it be. The winning design will be produced and a portion of the sales (I hope not 0,00001 %) will be given to the Surfrider Foundation which is committed since years in protecting the ocean life.

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

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)

The Drillmachine Race Team DRILLASS (Reinhard Dienes und Christian Breig) from the school of arts and Design Offenbach made it to the final round of the Black & Decker Drillmachinerace (previously posted here). With the technical supervision of Professor Peter Eckhart and the support from their girlfriends Christine “tine” Matz and Valerie “Val” Zilch who helped them with the Design of their Team Boxes and clothing, the DRILLAS were 4^th in the overall ranking of the race.

Thanks for the photos Christian! Congrats also! we want more details about your machine!

more pictures from the race

Today is the beginning of the Design Workshop “Temporary and Transformable Systems” held at the ESDI (Escola Superioir de Desenho Industrial) in Rio de Janeiro.

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.