Letsevo is (slowly) switching to Portuguese
Some of you may have noticed that many of our tweets and some of our stories are being written in a different language than english, portuguese. If you were puzzled with what was happening at Letsevo, I apologize for not writing this post before.
The Letsevo website started back in 2006 while living in germany, and the english language was suitable then taking in consideration the international environment I was immersed in. Even dough my definition of what Letsevo is has changed through time (from Letsevo Innovation group to Letsevo Open Design Platform), my goal with it has always been to develop products in a collaborative way. Being language an essential aspect of collaboration, and considering Letsevo’s new home in Brazil, I decided to slowly translate the platform to the portuguese language hoping that it will foster many partnerships and collaborations with Brazilian companies and Brazilian product developers and artists. It would be awesome to be able to have both languages but at this moment, due to capacity reasons, it won’t be possible. It was a hard decision to make, but I think it will be the best for the design projects we are developing.
Given this change, Letsevo Open Design Platform is now Letsevo Design Coletivo, and with time our website static pages and project pages will be translated as well. Past project updates and blog posts will be kept in english.
Since I am doing this alone, it will take long before it is done, so if anyone feels like helping, please make contact, or leave a message at the Lounge group in the playground, that would rock! Your feedback on this decision is much appreciated too.
Hello 2010
Hello 2010,
Personally, you mark the end of a 6 year incubation period in Germany and in Holland, where I lived amazing encounters that helped shape a great part of my design education and defined the beginning of my professional career. For Letsevo, you mark the beginning of new perspectives back where it’s first ideas were planted.
Because of this special moment, I want to dedicate this first Letsevo post of 2010, to all encounters of our lives which help us see the world differently, and I can tell, I had countless of them in these 6 years I spent in Europe. I am deeply thankful for that.
Let us have the creative energy to make every 2010 encounter “unforgetably” enriching. Happy 2010!
*I remixed Rodrigo Soldon´s Picture of MAC Niterói Licensed under Creative Commons
Letsevo Radar
This week, I am working on a new section on the website with the goal of becoming a central hub of Information on the platform. Until now, the common place for news and all non-project information was our Blog which has been supporting everything, from photo galleries of events we participate, to interviews and little articles about open innovation. This common place, which I am calling Radar (just because it sounds cool) shall be collaboratively written, as people show interest in participating.
Letsevo Radar will be hosting our platform news, stories about people in the network who are making something interesting, friends visiting technology events can post their impressions as well publish articles.
Our blog will still live strong, and probably from now on, it will get more philosophical with Radar taking care of the on-topic stuff.
Letsevo project’s open databases (CAD Libraries, DIY Instructions…)
I just finished the prototype of our project’s open databases. From now on, each Letsevo project has an open database featuring the project’s most important open data. This database can be accessed by Letsevo developers right from each projects’ sidebar.
For some of our projects, this database will mean that data can be shared and tracked to empower project development and communication. In that way it will be possible for developers to keep track of the design stages and to interact with suggestions for possible changes and improvements in for of “Reviews”.
Letsevo wants it’s new open databases to empower real time product development features, that means: after we create, we upload the file to the platform, we get feedback through “Reviews”, we discuss and apply changes right at the “entry’s database page”, and evolve.
We will begin using it to share CAD files, DIY Instructions but my goal is to make the database support not only “dev files” but also Supplier Listings and Component Reviews.
The database first prototype is half way working (file previews are very buggy still…). João helped me test the first “review test” and it works ok…Thanks!
Feedback on the database is much appreciated. We hope this will be widely used!
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small steps, big dreams
This month was full of work on what regards the website. The migration from wordpress to joomla is openning up new possibilities for Letsevo as a collaborative platform.
After the implementation of a Forum system, I added some social networking functionality to enable inter communication between collaborators and most importantly, have collaborator profile pages. Lots of improvements are still needed and not to mention the amount of bugs… but it is a step forward into creating a collaborative community around product innovation.
Website Ideas currently on the pipeline:
-The ability to have user profiles for sponsors and manufactures (still not really defined) but anyway, a system to make it easier for sponsors to interact with possible users they want to sponsor.
-A file publishing system, to enable each project to have it’s own database of Drawings, 3D files, Suppliers, Components, Templates etc to be easily documented, shared and commented.
-A front page layout that refreshes automatically when ever something is added to any of the projects (like digg.com)
In parallel to that, our Logo got a lift. The eurostile font gave space to custom made L, E, T, S, V, O that now “talk” more to the 4 arrows of the logo.
And there is one more thing, and it regards the title of this post, it’s Letsevo mantra for at least the rest of the year: Small Steps, Big Dreams. For me, It represents much of the way product development needs to be today: A series of small steps towards bigger dreams, that hopefully benefit not only the people involved in the projects and the companies sponsoring it, but the innovation and creative community as a whole. The “steps” part of the mantra, is every project blog post, every guest comment, every drawing uploaded, it’s the interactions we are having here. The “Dreams” part of the mantra, is on every collaborator’s mind, it’s what people will make with these interactions. I started Letsevo with the premise to help my projects get more exposure but I have understood now, that exposure is only part of the equation to put an idea in the market, it’s the interaction between people where knowledge is created and where a lot of satisfaction resides. With this thought I can see Letsevo evolving from being an Open Design Brand into an aspiring Design Incubator/Platform that facilitates the development of aspiring innovators with “Dreams” just like mine. Who knows, I will let future interactions guide me on this…=)
Letsevo Roots – 2002, Rio de Janeiro
At Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio, 2002 - The whole Crew
Back in 2002, in Rio. EVO Skateboards was launched. I put some old school photosup. What a fun night!! =) Great times!
Launch of the Letsevo Forums
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I have been twittering on last months about the research I was doing in order to improve the Letsevo Innovation Platform. The first implementation is out today, the Letsevo Forums. Built using the open source CMS software Joomla, the forums are made to support the conversation around our projects. I would be happy to see it hosting some interesting talks on the ideas we share.
There are some bugs in this new website still, but I am doing my best to learn Joomla fast so the site can be fixed and improved with time.
Letsevo Update: Project Status Indicator Added to each open project
Communicating what is the current state of a open project and what are the next steps to be taken has been done until now, purely by the exchange of emails between the collaborators of the platform. To an extend this works fine, but something was still missing: A simple way to easily communicate to anyone who visit the project’s page, which phase the project is currently on, and which are the missing links in order to move the project to the next step.
Now each Letsevo project’s page received a “Project Status” page, featuring information about the current state of development. The Idea is that people can leave comments on the “project Status Page” so that everyone can be part of the conversation.
A Status Scale was created by myself to visually communicate the Stage of development. This Project Status Scale uses the 5 phase design process* vocabulary coined by the famous Design Firm Ideo, described by the author Jeremy Myerson in the Book Ideo:Master of Innovations.
Ideo’s 5 step Design Methodology is:
1. Understand
2. Observe
3. Visualize
4. Evaluate and Refine
5. Implement
During the progress of this platform, we will optimize this “Project Status Scale” modifying it’s 5 phases to the needs of our projects, but for now Ideo’s 5 phase design methodology seems like a good starting point.
To see directly which is the status of each currently open project you can now refer to their respectively Status page:
e.Moped Project Status
ECOSK8 Project Status
*The 5 Phase Design Process of Ideo is also described in this Website
Lets 2007
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.
Lets Evo 2.0
Welcome to the new Lets Evo Website!
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
