Via André a.k.a SkimBrasil

“Those who think it can’t be done should not disturb those doing it”

The reason I want to share this at the blog is that when it comes to building stuff that ain’t there yet, when focusing on creating anything new, the chances are that you will meet lots of people saying that it can’t be done. Now because you can not control the actions of others, you got to believe in your instincts and in what you want to achieve. Ignoring gives you the power to focus on what needs to be done. It’s Ok to ignore and to go for it, the hard work will pay off at the end. But remember! In the end, once the big step was taken, you should always stop ignoring, and take every feedback as a learning. Every invention will profit from some fix here and there.

Meet SCRUM, a methodology mainly used in software development in which phases can strongly overlap without compromising the development process. It’s name comes from a Rugby terminology where the “whole team tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”*

This quick video by Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft explains very well how SCRUM works:

SCRUM’s short and fast paced framework makes each step (Version Release) an independent process, making it possible to overlap phases of the project easily without leaving people lost or losing time. This strikes me as a very interesting feature for projects in collaborative innovation networks which letsevo is trying to be. In a conventional Waterfall development methodology, it is really hard to accept contributions outside of the scope of a specific phase. As I am staring to realize, in collaborative environments like open networks, the outcome of a project depends on the ability of people to form teams and to jump in the process even if a project phase has already ended.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.*

For those wanting to get a deeper view on this project methodology, I suggest this Goolgle techtalk given by Jeff Sutherland one of the co-creators of the SCRUM software development process.

If you know examples of SCRUM applied to a collaborative product development we would be glad to hear your thoughts.

*Quote from SCRUM Wikipedia entry

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!

Long before the term “User Generated” became popular, Eric von Hippel, an MIT Professor, has been spreading his thoughts about the role of “Lead users” in product innovation.

He has written a “Must Read” book for everyone interested in the way innovations come about. In Democratizing Innovation he dismantles the myth that most of Innovations come from a couple of top secret research centers inside the headquarters of big companies. The book shows us many examples of innovative products, born at the heart of user communities that are than later adopted by the companies and brought to the market.

The book can be downloaded for free in .PDF format and for those who prefer watching a video than to read a book, MIT World website has a great video of a lecture from Professor von Hippel at MIT. Reading or Watching, Democratizing Innovation is a Lets Evo top 5!

If you want to know more about user driven innovation, I definetely suggest taking a look at this lecture by Charles Leadbeater given at the TED Conference.

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.

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

While trying to find more about the functional anatomy of such plants, like the Mimosa for example, I logged on to what is claimed to be the largest collection on writings by and from Charles Darwin. I was wondering if he had, at that time, written about the Mimosa or other “nastic plants”.

Interestingly, Charles has written about the Mimosa in some of his diary entrances, written in Rio de Janeiro, on the Autum of 1832. It was nothing really technical or anything related to it’s functional morphology but I was left wondering…. If Charles Darwin had a Blog…who would he have linked in his Blogroll.

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’s a 42 hour trip into his thoughts! I still didn´t see the whole video, I didn´t even get to the middle of it, but I think every one interested in understanding the mind of this great person should take a look inside. I am also thinking of writing to the institute that made the video avaliable to ask if there is a podcast version of it because being 42 hours in front of the computer is somewhat painful ( everything runs under a Real video format at the website). Maybe some one knows a way of generating mp3 or .mov data from Real video??

Buckminster Fuller’s Everything I know