Following Local Motors tweet, commenting next month’s Wired magazine cover story, the New Industrial Revolution Issue:
On the cover, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson puts: “The factory, the investors, the workers – obsolete. In the age of DIY manufacturing, all you need is a garage and a great idea.”
Even dough I also (and sometimes naively) think so, I have heard the opposite many times.
All I know is that this new industrial revolution has in deed already started. New forms of value creation have already been proven to spark new kind of enterprises and products, just look at Linux, Arduino and Threadless. And Letsevo is on this wave, trying to figure out how product design innovation will thrive in this new wiki-reality.
Among the open questions are:
Is the world going to get any better with DIY manufacturing and garage entrepreneurs building up their ideas?
And what are the skills needed to put these ideas in practice?
How are Universities going to adapt to this new industrial scenario?
who is joining in with us?
I would love to get some thoughts on this and can not wait to grab this issue.
I just brought home the book Producing Open Source Software. I am roughly in the middle of it now but I already feel the need to manifest my admiration for it’s teachings. The book, written by Karl Fogel, an open source developer himself, not only exposes the dynamics of open source projects (how things get done and which tools are essential for it) but also, “between the lines”, gives a series of best practices that can be aplyed on any kind of collaborative project.
The book also has arrows, coincidense or sign? =)
Some of it’s teachings regarding the dynamics of the projects are already flowing into our projects. For example, our electric motorcycle frame project, the e.Moped project, now features a Developer Guidelines Page to help future developers find their way into contributing to the project. Another important suggestion from the book and now implemented, is the writing of a mission statement of the project, making it clear for developers and the outside world what the project is trying to accomplish. Also mentioned in the book is the importance having the type of License the project is running on, right on the front page of the project, which seams quite obvious but as the author points out, is often missed in many projects.
The book is opening my eyes to a lot of details on how successful open source software projects are organized and definitely suggest it to anyone interested in not only open source development but the social skills need for successful collaborative work.
In a near future, I will be posting questions that were raised in my head after getting to know more about the process of open source software development. In my opinion, there are a lot of tools missing that would make it possible to fully develop Hardware in the same way that Software is developed. There is already a spark of discussion started by Portuguese designer João Rocha at the forums. It would be nice to hear more voices on this subject.
I tried to illustrate in the picture above, what an participatory innovation ecosystem Letsevo wants to be. It is the first attempt to organize and communicate the concepts being discussed here at the blog. I believe that People, Ideas, Projects, Collaboration, Sponsors and Cool Products, should be the foundation for an Innovation Platform hoping to foster the development of innovative products and technologies. Under this 6 categories, I wrote some terms to further specify the participatory “pillar”.
Am I missing some “ingredient”? Should any term be added to better express the innovation cycle in a collaboration age? I am happy to hear some thoughts on it.
We are proud to post here the first entries to our “Artist Series” initiative of the ecosk8 project. To know more about the Artists and their work, make sure to visit the project’s gallery
A new application for the Iphone, called Netsketch, enables two people to draw an image together, through the touch interface of the Iphone. I don’t believe it can be of great use in a professional design environment but I have to take my hat of for this fun initiative.
I can think of some applications for integrating real-time drawing capabilities on smart phones: collective VJing, Interactive walls…
Numa iniciativa de envolver artistas e de reunir desenhos para futuras artes dos shapes do projeto ecosk8 estou colocando disponível aqui no site um arquivo .PSD (photoshop) para servir de base para futuros gráficos dos decks ecosk8.
Charles Leadbeater just finished his book We-Think. And for it’s start, he put out this video in youtube questioning the crowd about the challenges of today’s sharing culture.
well, I think that the days of the lonely scientist are gone. Today, initiating conversations and sharing ideas is the a fundamental task in order to solve the complex problems that we face today.
Letsevo was started with the philosophy that there is a great power in open collaboration, and that great products can be achieved through an open interaction between people with different backgrounds. As a product designer, I have the power to visualize products and new uses of technologies. Designers can even go a little bit further and build rough prototypes of them. But in product Design, most of the times you need a lot of help implementing ideas, testing, taking them to production and finally market insertion. I think that sharing ideas and experiences on all of the development stages provide a chance for people who know better to influence and to collaborate in the design of products.
That is one of the very first ideas behind Letsevo, finding people with similar dreams to help bringing them to reality.
Now, how do you earn a living when everybody is sharing their ideas?
Letsevo thinks there has to be a balance on what you share and what sell. For example: Participating on the development of the open source operational system Linux, gives programmers the possibility to show off their skills and gain recognition in their field. Linux was created by a crowd of collaborators and it is free to download and to use it. But if you want to have support on implementing Linux in your company, you pay companies like Redhat to help you setting up everything right.
Sharing ideas in communities like Linux is a way of most people to start their professional life nowadays, gather experience, gain reputation in their field. Often, a lot of the people ho collaborate in projects like Linux are offered great jobs at companies like Microsoft, IBM or Google.
I really don’t know yet if something like that could be applied in product design, everything here at Letsevo is still really experimental. All we know is that sharing is fun and help ourselves achieve higher dreams.
Today is the offcial start of the e.Moped Design Project. After having talked to some friends about Letsevo’s plans to start a open source project of an electric scooter, the wishes have finally come to reality.
I spent a a couple of hours programming and setting up the space for this project here at Letsevo.
Colaborators are wanted, we need engineers, electrical mechanics, motor developers, test riders, designers….any one wanting to evolve this idea further.
I know this a pretty daring task, to build such a vehicle from scratch. But for me, the wish of some day, be cruising around the neighborhoods on what we built, is much greater than the fear of failling. Not to mention having in the end, collaborated for more clean ways of transporting ourselfs around our planet!
This next article seems to Letsevo as a great mark in the collaborative design process. Wikitecture, as the folks from the Wikitecture Studio are calling it, is the first attempt I have seen in order to solve a long anticipated challenge of coming up with a programming language to build CAD constructions in a Wiki-like way. Wikitecture, as demonstrated in this youtube video, is a Secondlife scripting based project, to empower people to build Architecture together just like writing and editing Wikipedia entrances.
This is the birth of a whole new ecology system of Industry, software companies and contributors collaborating to build great things!
Are companies going to ignore that we, the people, can help each other build all the products we want when technologies like Wikitecture become more mature?? Are companies going to react like majority of the Academic field reacted against Wikipedia, rejecting the fact that the wisdom of the crowd could in deed create a Encyclopedia from scratch?
I am a true believer that the things are going to change around here. Maybe it is time to start a new Letsevo project together!! A problem so complex that we would need the help of each other to achieve great results. Something around mobility, an collaborative electric moped? Something so modular, everyone could have its own customized electric moped to cruise around the neighborhood. Seems challenging to me, and fun to work on.
Can we get some companies to “Blend-in” their CAD parts for us to design around it? Batteries, Electric Motors, suspension forks, Disc brakes?
Can we get some brothers that share this dream? Marcello, Piers, Jochen, Nico, Christian, Basti, Peter, Gross….all the creative minds out there…Lets Wikit!?
There has been a lot of hype nowadays around concepts like crowd-sourcing and open-source and user-generated things. Lots of new business are been started and closed everyday trying to grasp this leap of todays way of working. But many of them haven’t achieved great success because business plans for such initiatives are still very difficult to succeed.
There are lots of problems regarding the rewards participation in product development, when in the end, someone is making money out of the ideas generated buy contributors around the globe.
Thats where Kluster gets my consideration and I will explain why. Kluster is a brand new company launched on 18th of February. It is a social network focussed on the development of products (which can be anything, from mp3 players and logos to events) which aims to reward every contribution to projects with some kind of monetary participation of the total value of the project.
I will tell a little bit of my impressions as I (of course) tryed it out.
First, I was amazed by how easy it is to setup everything and to start working on on going projects. The idea is that every project is broken down in phases which have a time stamp and a Reward is good to make complex tasks manageable. If you have an idea (called “spark”) you can contribute right away. If your “Sparks” follows to the next phase you automatically already wins participation on the gains on the end of the project. If you see a “Spark” from someone else, you can them suggest improvents “Amps”, which if are also aproved, you get participation points called “Watts”.
“Watts” are the currency inside of Kluster which can be changed in to Real money like the “Linden dollars” of second Life.
This is where Kluster starts to get real interest and where I think it has its potential. Once you have “watts” and you receive them by contributing to a project or to simply completing your profile you can “Invest” them on the Ideas “Sparks” of others, If there Sparks advance, you also get participation points “watts”. But if they don’t advance, you lose your invested “Watts”. This is a great incentive for people to vote on other ideas, and to vote well, because otherwise, you are using what you invested, your watts, your work hours.
In 45 minutes, I filled my profile, Contributed with “Sparks” for 3 Projects, Invested some “watts” in 3 other “Sparks” and Invited friends to participate and made 2670 “watts”.
Then I questioned my self, how many dollars does one “Watt” gives me?? Maybe some of you can answer this. I just don’t know.
But to finalize this post:
I think Kluster is an amazing experiment in this new world of wikinomics and hope to learn more about it as I try it. Will it survive the real world? Will it empower people to solve more problems? Will companies use it as a tool for developing products?
Here is a view of my profile page in Kluster
I would love to here some comments here at letsevo so I pass the MIC now. Peace
A couple of months ago I wrote in a post my humble manifesto to democratization of design, claiming that we “hyperlinked” kids want to influence more and more how products are. I also wrote in another post about the changes that simple free CAD software could bring to the product development process alowing brands to collaborate with its most valuable asset: its users.
Dassaut systemes is aiming to grasp the user-generated design wave by enabling everyone to create 3d Modells and share them in their platform just like you do with your pictures by flickr. So at www.3dvia.com anyone can login and start creating, sharing and rating each others design.
Google started ahead with its Sketchup software and 3dWarehouse but deliver very low-quality graphics and accuracy to build real stuff with it. I found it so bad I didn’t even boder writing about it here in Letsevo. Now 3dvia Shape sofware, seems to have has a lot more graphic power than google`s software. One thing that bodered me is that even dough you can see amazing models made by some users in their gallery, I can seem to imagine that they were build right inside of the program. I may be wrong but by looking at the avaiable tutorials in their website it seems like their software still lack a lot of the building tools most of the product design software have (Sweep along rail, Lofts, fillets….) meaning you cannot build complex shapes right away. Lets hope they increment it right away.
But what really sets 3dvia apart from google is it´s nice social network features where users can build profiles and embed 3d models as widgets in other websites just like youtube. You still need to download a plugin to view it but it is awesome.
Download the player and check the following out:
This guy build a sweet bmx bike!! That could be the user of the future saying: look! BRAND, this is how I want my product, are you going to ignore me? I think this is going to be awesome, this platform can serve as place to exchange files with other designers, engineers and to also show the users what is beeing done and have there comments write on the spot!
Sweet huhn? Now in my opnion its is going to be a long way for it to be reallity, but I have the feeling they are in the right track.
My two hints for Dassaut Systemes are:
1.Let people import and export geometrical data from other 3d sofwares like .iges, .dwg, .3dm ( don´t try to be like sony and the blue-ray disc!!!) If you let us use your software to read existing data than design companies are going to take this serious. Until then it will be only internet hype not a social revolution.
2.If you want to be really a tool for the product design STARTUP companies in the the collaboration era, think wiki or basecamp for product design: 3d files with construction history and the ability to handle multiple layers. To help my point picture this scenario. I want to build an electric bike and I am only a designer. I have some nice design ideas and I find in the internet a couple companies that procuce batteries, other companies produce motors….other build suspension forks…I call them up and invite them for a project hosted at your site and we all start uploadings components in to one file having the power to collaborate in real time! How cool would that be!? Content Central and e-drawings for the masses?
Give us the tools and we are gonna build stuff you could never imagine of! Yeah.
When a first saw this two years ago I though it was just another internet “waist my time hype”. In deed it can actually fall into this category if you aren’t interested in how collective creation can be achieved. The fact is that Peter Edmunds’ Swarm Sketch it’s actually damn good example of the collective power of the internet.
SwarmSketch uses the concept of a drawing task to visualize the power of collective organization. It does so setting the rules into which collective intelligent can exist.
This is how it works:
Every week a randomly subject is chosen to become the Drawing task for the week. Every visitor can contribute with a new line to the sketch. Following that, the visitor can vote for the relevance of the lines of other visitors, giving a opacity level to them. The darkness of each line represents the average of other visitor’s votes. In this way visitors help to moderate the direction in which the drawing is going (self regulation). After a week or when the Sketch reaches 1000 lines, the final result is shown and a new is started.
The gallery of the project shows every subject that was collective sketched since the start of it in 2005. A nice animation from the beginning to the end of each sketch can be seen along with all statistics about it.
Swarm Sketch of a Squid – Image source: swarmsketch.com
