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

Many thanks to Massimo from Openp2pdesign for spreading the word!

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.

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

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 Radar

The Eyewriter Project is an on-going effort to empower Phisically paralyzed artists to get back to creation. Powered by DIY tools and opensource software, the group has put together an amazing video showing the technology being used by the legendary LA graffiti writer Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE, was almost completely physically paralyzed, except for his eyes after being diagnosed with ALS in 2003. This is truly moving.

Eyewriter Project
via Infosthetics

Martin Wenzel created this sculptural wooden bar in Rio de Janeiro. He came up this work for the opening of the Studio Antonia Rodrigues and the launch of the 6th issue of Miroir, the young design and fashion magazine published by Priscila Miranda.

I have long watched his experiments with wood while together at the design school in Germany, and this new work is just one of the signs that his visit to Brazil won’t be left unseen.

Martin Wenzel Website

I love DIY badges

Several sizes along with a Black version with white Type are available. If one of the sizes doesn’t suit your website perfectly, open the photoshop master file and DIY it! Enjoy.

*I used the free King font which comes very close to the original ITC American Typewriter font.

Download DIY Badges

The Folha Seca, one of our boards developed in collaboration with Brazilian ecological company Fibra, was featured in last weekend’s Esporte Espetacular. We are still working to put the board on the market but  it’s great to see our project getting this kind of attention. The snippet of the TV program can be seen online. It is great to see in the video, Bob Burnquist’s similar efforts to put an ecologic board on the market! way to go Bob, maybe we should do something together!

A step-by-step instruction guide of our DIY Skateboard project is up on the project’s page.

Date: 25th October 2009
Time: 19 O’clock
Place: Cine Odeon, Centro
Tickets can be bought here
LookOut Trailler
Festival Trailler
The Whole festival Program can be found here
Make sure not to loose it if you are in Rio!

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

After writing about the Madmax Bike spotted in Lyon, I started thinking that it would be awesome if we would be able to give an award to everyone that inspires us.

The Inspiring Bastard Awards is born, at least as an experiment. And the first one to receive the award is the creator of the madmax bike that made me think of this award in the first place. We don’t know his or her  identity yet, but as soon as he or she gets in touch we will send an Inspiring Bastard T-shirt.

For this to be a true bottom up movement, I imagine to set up a dedicated page on the Letsevo website, with a form where anyone can suggest an Inspiring Bastard, and send them an Inspiring Bastard t-shirt. In the website, there would be a page for every inspiring bastard, their stories and an indication for the person who gave him/her the award.

Who do you think deserves to receive an Inspiring Bastard Award?

“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.

If you are a madmax kind of guy, this is the bike you should be riding. I love to bump into this kind of creations, it really inspires me. This bike is so awesome, I guess it was made from an old moped frame, adapted to bike….any clues on which model? If you know the owner of this bike call him up to get some more info for us, we all want to know.

I just finished the prototypes 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.

See it working

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!

We got to love this ad from Norway.

via: designbivouac

Human Body Template

Made for checking the frame ergonomics of our e.Moped project, this 1:1 Scale drawing can also be helpful for other projects.

With the theme “what does Brazil has to offer to world today?”, the first TEDx organized in Brazil has been creating a buzz in Brazil’s blogosphere. The date is confirmed: 14th of november 2009 at the Teatro Anhembi Morumbi. Check the confirmed voices at the events page

via @gcmartinelli

Hello! Welcome to my first post here. When I told Henrique that I was going to this event, he suggested I write a post for the site and share some of what I had experienced.  So here it is….

I had the pleasure of going to Friedrichshafen this year to attend three days of the Eurobike international bicycle trade show.  It was absolutely mind-boggling the size of this thing.  Tens of thousands of bikes in about 12 football field sized exhibition halls.  It took me three days of seven hours per day to see every booth, and I’m sure I missed a lot of what the show had to offer.  The big story this time was the rise of electric bikes.  There were two different test tracks where you could try any of the models from several dozen manufacturers.  This part of the industry is huge, and growing.  Fixed gear bikes are also all the rage, and everyone seems to have one.  There were a few notable bikes and accessories that I thought would be appropriate for Letsevo, so check out the pictures (and don’t forget to read the descriptions below the pictures) in the gallery to get a feel of where we’ve gotten to in this crazy cycling world.

[View with PicLens]

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 saw this little car last week in Monaco and went on to research where it comes from. It’s the Newteon Estrima, Newteon describes itself as an electric vehicles distribution network and they are based in France. They market a series of electric vehicles but I couldn’t really tell if they build and develop the cars themselves.

Newteon’s website

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) Fale brevemente do que faz, você é designer gráfico? Ainda estuda? Quando e onde estudou?

(ZA) Me chamo Fernando Zanoni, ou simplismente ZA., tenho 23 anos de idade, sou natural de Curitiba PR e estou cursando o último, quinto e derradeiro ano de design gráfico na Universidade Federal do Paraná. Gosto também da atividade de designer, porém tento levar a ilustração meus desenhos e a arte, um pouco a parte da atividade do design. É claro que em muitas vezes, uma coisa encontra a outra mas assim mantenho meu trabalho com os desenhos mais autoral, porém, não seria mal ganhar dinheiro com isso algum dia..

(Letsevo) Como foram seus primeiros passos na ilustração?

(ZA) É difícil saber, mas o primeiro esporro que lembro de ter tomado na escola quando era criança, foi porque eu estava desenhando durante uma aula que nem sei de quê…Tenho isso desde criança, sempre gostei de desenhar!

Arte para o Shape Ecosk8 por ZA

(letsevo) Quais são suas ferramentas prediletas para ilustratar? Quando e onde você trabalha numa ilustração? Tem algum lugar favorito onde gosta de trabalhar?

(ZA) Cara uso muito papel, tinta nankin, canetas e marcadores! As vezes nem sei distinguir o que é esboço do que é desenho efetivo e final. Não consigo manter por exemplo, um caderno de esboços. Se me deixar eu consumo ele em uma sentada.
E assim, de inúmeros desenhos que eu traço no papel, só escaneio e dou cor no computador, par uns 2 ou 3. Ás vezes uso xerox também pra fazer uns lambe-lambes pra colar na rua. Vez em quando saio pra pintar e fazer grafitti, mas é raro. Não tenho a mesma pegada e traço com o spray…porisso meu involvimento com a arte de rua e grafitti ta sendo mais através dos lambe-lambes, dae consigo preservar o traço de um jeito que eu gosto.

(Letsevo) O que mais te inspira a iniciar uma ilustração?

(ZA) Puts, isso varia. tudo acaba sendo inspiração…vai de um lance ruim a uma coisa banal, e também de uma alegria a um imenso bacanal. Tudo me inspira, mas andar de skate, ver coisas que gosto ouvir música, ter contato com coisas novas sempre ajuda!

(Letsevo) É possível ver uma série de personagens em sua arte, esses personagens figurados em seu trabalho existem no mundo real? Fazem parte do seu dia a dia?

(ZA) Uns sim outros não. Na verdade, nunca penso em um personagem em específico, tento representar através deles várias coisas e pessoas. Ás vezes eu simplismente sento e desenho. É natural, exceto quando a ilustração têm um briefing ou têm que representar algo em específico, dae é premeditado!

Tigre - ZA

(Letsevo) Cada artista trabalha de uma forma diferente. Fale um pouco do seu processo de trabalho. Quando você começa uma ilustração por exemplo, já tem em mente precisamente o resultado que quer atingir ou a ilustração vai evoluindo e se modificando ao longo do seu processo de trabalho?

(ZA) É mais ou menos como eu expliquei anteriormente. Se existe um briefing, to fazendo algo pra um concurso e tal, eu penso, rascunho escrevo as idéias. se for de livre expressão, dae eu sento e simplismente desenho…posso desenhar horas e tudo ficar ruim, e no fim juntar tudo e jogar for a. O importante é desenhar. Quanto à resultados, sei lá, dinheiro é bom e necessário, mas acho que isso deve vir quem sabe com o tempo. Acho que todo artista durante a carreira vai aprimorando seu estilo e técnicas. Acho que isso é natural e inevitável.

(Letsevo) Você participou do nosso projeto ecosk8, com uma arte belíssima para os Shapes. Qual a sua ligacäo com o skate?

(ZA) Cara, minha ligação é de amor incondicional! Ganhei meu primeiro skate com 11 anos de idade, desde então to aê! Ultimamente só consigo andar nos finais de semana e olhe lá, mas o importante é se divertir. O skate influi no meu trabalho..na verdade não só nas ilustrações, mas na vida, num contexto geral! Coisas que eu desenho, músicas  que eu escuto, roupas que eu visto..tudo ta enrraizado no skate. Quero um dia trabalhar junto com o skate. Quem sabe uma marca, produção de vídeos, sei lá, mas quero retribuir isso pro skate. Skate é diversão, e cara, pra mim, é tão arte e expressão quanto desenhar! É incontável o número de skatistas que desempenham funções artísticas e criativas. Todo skatista é um criativo e uma semiótico em potencial. Depois que vc pisa em um skate, você nunca mais ve a formas da cidade sem ponderar se ali você pode ou não andar.Na hora em que aparece a filmagem do senado federal, e aquela cabaçada, comendo um a orelha  do outro, você vai estar se imaginado dando um rolê naquela transição azul.

ZA

(Letsevo) Tem algum lugar ou objeto que você ainda quer ver sua arte aplicada?

(ZA) Cara, trabalhar com música, capas de disco, skate decks, ou sei lá, tudo que tenha ligação com coisas que gosto sempre vai ser gratificante. Mas gostaria de trabalhar em projetos editorias, ilustrar livros quem sabe. Tudo é válido, cada situação é um desafio. Quero também, depois que finalizar a faculdade, pq agora tá trash de conciliar tudo, colar mais cartazes e pintar mais de volta na rua!…e sei lá né, quem sabe a capa da NewYorker. brincadera!

UM abraço ao pessoal da Letsevo e ao pessoal do projeto ecosk8. Iniciativa muito massa.
É isso!

(Letsevo) Obrigado por participar do projeto ECOSK8 com sua arte.  Nós esperamos que muitos se inspirem com o seu trabalho.

Para conhecer mais sobre o trabalho do ZA, segue o link da página dele: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fernandozanoni/

Para ver a galeria de colaboradores do projeto ECOSK8: http://www.flickr.com/groups/letsevoskateboarddesigns/pool/

Mountain Bike videos shot by flying “birds”? I see my wish closer to reality.

Via Yann’s Techno Toys Blog

20090803-Participation Platform - first sketch

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.

This month was full of extremes, apart from the adventure of building a new forum for Letsevo and my new more aerodynamic hair style, I was fortunate enough to join two good friends onto another adventure, Crossing the Alps between Italy and France. Together with Jochen and Johannes, we biked 363.34 Kilometers, climbing a total of 13935 Meters during 8 days of our tour that started in Pinerolo (Italy) and ended the Mediterranean city of Ventimiglia, also in Italy.

It was the second time I rode such tour, the first time me and Jochen crossed the north east of Spain together with Basti Hess (very missed), also amazing. This time we also went freestyle (no camping tents) just sleeping back and the faith that rain wasn’t going to pour, and it almost didn’t.

We crossed the Alps everyday, switching from “Bon Giorno!” to “Bonjour”, rustled ourselves between hardcore uphills and hardcore downhills, following the paths and tips from a tour published at Mountain Bike Magazine.

Thanks to Jochen, our GPS data from the tour can be seen in Google Earth making it possible to travel back exactly through the trails we made, how awesome is that? feel like traveling to time? Make sure to turn on “Show Terrain” feature.

Download .KMZ file (google earth) from our tour, you have to have Google Earth installed in you computer to be able to navigate.

My thanks to Jochen for organizing the route and to Johannes for bringing the cooking utensils, also Mark Assies for the sleeping bag! and Timon Rutten from Hans Struik Fietsen Shop for hooking me up with some bike parts I needed for the tour.

Where should we go on the next tour??

[View with PicLens]

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!

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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

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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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.

...

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.

...

I just received a flyer of bicycle race that will be held in Delft next 5th of July. It would be my first race on the pavement and I am pretty excited to participate. I would still be competing on a mountain bike and because of that I am looking for sponsorship for taking part on it. I need need slick tires for my mountain bike so I can have a chance against all the roadies. If you have a bike shop, or any other business…a featured article about the race and your support will be posted here at the website.

Infos about the Race
Race Series: ZoMoCo
Organization: WTOS
Location: Delft Techpark

If you have interest in supporting you may contact me directly. Letsevo!

A manifest on the support of athletes in the information age can be found in a previous post.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Italian artist Blu wows everyone with his amazingly crafted wall animation.
More of his work on blublu.org

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

[View with PicLens]

The dudes at Wired.Com wrote a great story about it, and a cool video which I’m posting it here.

I taught that since the e.Moped project is still on its initial phase…maybe a good goal would be to build one for a competition like this, for now It was only meant for Zero Motorcycles, but who knows..I bet there could be a great challenge to open up for other brands…

Follow us at: http://www.twitter.com/letsevo

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!

Last Month I was back in Rio de Janeiro, 3 weeks of a mix of relaxing moments with friends and important meetings. While there, I remembered that when I was still in University, one of my good friends Daniel Xveid would always remind me that one day, I would have to design some crazy lamp for his house. So, there I went, looking for all I needed to build a Light DIYstric Lamp to surprise him.

Now the DIYstric Lamp returns to it’s birth place, Rio de Janeiro. Daniel, hope you enjoy it!

On the e.Moped project, I have started to discuss with Piers the points relevant to the Understanding of the world around electric mopeds. In this phase 1, we are defining the general uses and configurations for the moped we are going to build.

You can participate on the discussion on the Project Status Page .

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

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.

My favorite design blog Core77 just put up their new 1-HOUR Design Challenge: Design a laser-cut grip tape inlay for a Longboard. They teamed up with “Laser Cutting for the masses” company Ponoko and Bustin Boards and will be receiving entries until January 28. The best 3 designs will be made and sent to their respective creators. Too bad the Letsevo skateboards aren’t ready yet, this is totally something we would support! Anyway, great initiative! On your marks! go!

Buglabs

Check it out!

Step by Step:

DIYstrict light – Build, Plug and Play!

Although I am positive that the name of an art work doesn’t make it an better art piece, I do think it’s important. Picture yourself, wondering through a contemporary art gallery, imagine you know nothing about formal Art (at least you didn’t study it), you stand in front of what seems to be a group of 8 randomly displayed, white “marshmalowish” balls sitting on a room filled with sand. You are in front of the a contemporary art installation, and you think: what the Hell? next, puzzled, you go to the name plate and it says: Untitled, 1998 Mr. Artist – Rocks; sand and marshmallow. what the F@&k! you almost feel like screaming. Houston we have a problem. Yep, I have been there too my dear reader! The name was the only clue to bring some understanding to the object without post graduating in the history of arts. People get angry, many feel very bad. What a sad story, at least in my opinion.

In order to fight for the democratization of art we have to fight for more satisfied art consumers, I am starting today a movement against Untitled artworks, for the sake of the mere mortals who don’t have a degree in Art but who just want to have a go in understanting the story being told by the artist, on the fly, on the spot. How we are going to do this? No, please, lets not come up with sticker tags, or barcodes…that after you scaning it with your iphone, link to the wikipedia article of that art work. Lets give this artists some homework to do! send them letters! require some explanation =) they will like it.

I didn’t do my homework I have to confess, ’cause the art object up there still features the Untitled flag. Well, ok, at least I am here, writing about it.

But the problem of my Untitled art object is still not solved.

Here is what I propose:

Deal?

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!

Click here to go to the gallery site

Until now, a total of 19 Artists collaborated with 36 Artworks until today, Letsevo’s Favorite Picks are:

Sextafeira from Amnd (Brazil)
~ so many possibilities ~ from opaquEpiphany (Australia)

Thanks for all contributions! It very exciting to see all of your creations! Spread the word, push the button.

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..