Meet DIYLILCNC, an opensource CNC milling machine project set to teach anyone to build there own milling tool. The initiative came from 2 chicago-based artists and educators of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thanks to them, today with around 700 dollars and some time invested putting the parts together, anyone can have their own CNC milling machine at home.

While Computer Numerical Controlled machines are nothing new, the availability of open-source building plans is a reflection of the democratization of innovation we have been seeing in the last years.

DIYLILCNC project website

There are several  3D CAD software packages available for designers today. Among them we can find mainly 3 kinds of 3D software, each one of which excels in a different way: Nurbs modelers whelp create amazing surface models and are widely used to create fast complex surfaces,  Polygon-based modelers due to it’s shape morphing modeling process generate models that are perfect for film animations. Parametric modelers which excel in the technical realm due to it’s mathematical way of describing shape thus producing very exact geometries required in industrial processes. The most advanced open source modeler today is Blender, a polygon-based modeller, that unfortunately, can not be really used for technical product development.

Screenshot of FreeCAD

FreeCAD is the first an opensource parametric modeler that I have seen with potential to shake things up in the world of  product design. 3D Design software can be super expensive costing up to 20 or 30 thousand dollars for a license. Alibre Design , priced today at 398 Dollars is already a solid alternative to the more expensive packages like Catia, Solid Works or Pro/engineer. An open source alternative like FreeCAD, could, not only mean an immense cost reduction for innovation startups that can’t afford the kind of investment a CAD Package requires, but most importantly, shorten the road into a democratic file standard for the creative industry if widely adopted.

The battle for file standards is old, files created in Solidworks can be imported but not edited in Pro/engineer, Rhino files are not compatible with Catia models if you want to work further on it, and and and. I believe that a great deal of energy and time is lost, when moving between CAD systems, time that could be used to resolve creative problems, play video-game other discuss about life. The further development of an open-source parametric modeler like freeCAD could mean a big step towards a file standard available to all, because of it’s “openness”.

Imagine how companies would benefit from these developments, think of IBM and it’s widely support of the Linux OS, and how it helped reducing the costs of its servers. Anyone wanting to get involve with the developments go to the FreeCAD sourceforge page an contact the developers, I am sure they would love to hear from prospective users and eventual sponsors, letsevo!

Read more about freeCAD at Make and at Solidsmack

While reading about open source software development, I bumped into a product development methodology that seems pretty different than the methodologies being talked about in Design Schools and yet very interesting to be spread around further into product design context.

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

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We have been hearing that we are all have 3D printers at home in the future and produce our on things. Today, for 750 US Dollars you can buy a Makerbot Kit and start printing your life around. It’s all open source, meaning if you feel like giving it a go and make one yourself, you can download the drawings and go for it. For the more “confy seeking people” for 2500 US Dollars today, you can buy the fully assembled version. I want one.

Choosing the right colors for a product is not an easy task, what usually happens is that a designer also doesn’t have enough time left to experiment with color because he spent it all on finding the perfect shape and solving out all technical requirements.

That’s were design combinatorics can come in. Dr woohoo, an artist based in the USA has post a video demonstrating a way of generating numerous color combinations from a given design concept. He is using the new capabilities of creating flash plugins to interact with applications like adobe illustrator CS4 through the use of ActionScript, a scripting language used primarily for the development dynamic websites on Flash.

Apparel Combinatorics from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

In this video, Dr. Woohoo demonstrates a little application that generates color and stroke variations on a vector rendering of an Adidas shoe. In the video, we can see that the application automatically exports jpeg files of an enormous amount of color variations of the design. How cool is that!? As you can see in the video, the amount of generated combinations is huge, so a new challenge arises, which is, having to sweep through the thousands of combinations to pick the ones you want. But anyway, having an app doing the color combinations and afterwards having you to pick the most interesting results can be a nice way to speed up the design process and to even surprise yourself.

I did a little research to find out how he made this little app, and by now I would guess that his combinatoric application was made possible through the new “PatchPanel technology” Adobe is releasing on their developer website:

“PatchPanel is a Flex library and set of services that make it possible for Shockwave® Flash® (SWF) files to work as Adobe Creative Suite CS3 and CS4 plug-ins. Flex developers can include this Flex library in their projects in order to create Flash plug-ins that access the ExtendScript Document Object Model (DOM) of Creative Suite applications through ActionScript objects.”

I was totally excited to see something I always wanted to have as a designer shine in front of my eyes. Let’s hope Dr. Woohoo brings more info on how to implement this.

And of course we totally dig the “evolutionary mindset” taking over the field of “design tools”. What about you? Do you have any wish for a “combinatoric” design application? What about automatically generating renderings out of CAD software like Maya or Cinema 4D? Those used on spending hours and hours tweaking light and material parameters for rendering 3D models in such programs know how nice it would be to have some “Charles Darwin twist to it”.

Render probes in Cinema 4D - Could finding the right light setting be easier?

For example, design combinatorics could have been of great use in the renderings of the folha seca skateboard. The image above shows a little overview on the rendering attempts in Cinema 4D before getting the right light and shadow results. It took me almost 3 hours..could it have been faster using design combinatorics to auto generate light, shadow, and material settings overnight and to have some options to choose from in the next morning? I wish..

With Adobe having bought Macromedia, we are seeing the merge of the capabilities of flash and its Creative Suite Softwares. As of in generative design, the combination of mathematical algorithms in the design process is opening up a whole new set of possibilities for designers and artists to express their creativity. Lets just hope that other design software companies will follow.

This experiment can turn out to be a new section on the e.Moped project site, It’s my first attempt to use yahoo pipes mashup tool. The pipe you see above can aggregate automatically solidworks+tutorial Tags in the bookmarking service Delicious along with tutorials from the the SWX Design website into an always updating piece of Java Sript code.

The result is what you seen here, a RSS feed capable of being placed into any website. There is a whole range of possibilities with this mashup tool, even combining Flickr, Geo Data Information to Display photos on Google Earth. I see my dream “Skateboard Ramp Mapping Widget” coming soon. Got any ideas for other cool pipes? write on..