Mark your calendars if your are in Rio de Janeiro  next Sunday, 25th of october. It’s the first screening of LookOut – Temporada na neve, at 9th Mostra Internacional de Filmes de Montanha.

LookOut shows the day-to-day experiences of 4 friends on a season of snowboarding in USA. It was filmed and edited by Marcello Cavalcanti, which collaborated in our ecosk8 project making some awesome videos of your tests (Film 1, Film 2).

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!

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

Here are the photos of my visit to this year’s Hannover Industry Fair, Germany’s most important innovation event. I had an amazing time during my 2 day visit to the fair.

Under Highlights are the great work of my friends from the school of arts and Design in Offebach, some information on components and innovations on electric vehicles and a lot of new materials!

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

[View with PicLens]

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!

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me if I could tell him about design events that are happening here in Europe since he is planning to spend some months traveling around the old continent.

I sent him a couple of events that I know happen every year and pointed out to him Upcoming.org, one of those clever web 2.0 tools that does the task of organizing shared events from users around the globe. Think Flickr for your calendar, did some thing sparkle in your mind? Well, it sure sparkled in my mind that craves for exploring the potentials of such tools.

Why am I talking about a calendar tool here in letsevo? What does that have to do with product innovation?

Before starting to explain or respond to these two questions I would like you to please take a look at the Sidebar of the Letsevo website, the right sidebar. YEAH YEAH YEAH!!!

I am freaking glad to anounce the brand new Letsevo Collaboration Calendar! Powered by Upcoming.org and some mad artists/designers/scientists/cool-kids/inventors/whatever contributors that want to join the team of letsevo in the task of tagging every event surrounding technology, innovation, design.

Why am I doing this?
Because I want to share the events I know with the developing community and in this away help spreading the news about places to go when you want to exchange ideas, see new things and learn whats going on.
Why collaborativately?
Because I am positive that there are always people that know more then us, and when we do this together we have more power to achieve greater changes.
Why should you participate?
Because its fun to change the world, action by action. But in order to answer this question more accurately I will tell you a small story that happened to me:

I got to know that this year’s Volvo Sportsdesign award theme was EcoDesign through a post in the Design Blog “Design.com.br”, writen by Fernando Galdino. Without Fernando writing it about it in his blog, Letsevo would probably miss the deadline of the Award. We, from theEcosk8 project, sent immediately a prototype of our ecological Skateboard to the Award. And as I wrote here before, we were nominated for the Board equipment category!! If it wasn’t for Fernando Galdino and his love for sharing his knowledge, maybe it would have been too late for us to participate.

I hope Letsevo Calendar helps someone just like Fernando’s post helped the ecosk8 project!

Wanna participate? Logon to the Letsevo Calendar group inside of Upcoming.org and start to change the things around here. Lets evo!!!

It took a while to believe but we were there! Our Ecosk8 project was nominated for the board category of this years Volvo Sportsdesign Award. Among names like Salomon Snowboards, Arbor Snowboards and amazing projects like the Ecomoana Surfboard, our “Folha Seca” skateboard was the only chosen product from the southern hemisphere.

I had the chance, together with Pedro Themoteo and Bruno Temer from Fibra Design Sustentável
to go to this years Design Forum at ISPO to represent our project. Our open development project was chosen to participate in the “Elevator Pitch” where some of the best projects had 90 seconds to tell what they were about. Bruno represented our team and did an amazing job, finishing our message right on the last second bring a wild applause from the crowd.

Checkout some of the Pictures of the Event!!

At the end, Salomon Snowboards was awarded with the final prize with their “Sickstick” Bamboo Board. We got to know David Farcot and Henri Rançon from Salomon and were amazed by David Farcot’s words of support to our project while he spoke on stage. That was awesome! congratulations David and Henri.

Another great thing about the award is that it happens in the same time as the Volvo Design Forum – with this years main theme – Eco Design. Among the several lectures the forum organizes workshops that are really interesting to take part. I got the chance to participate on the “Build a chariot from Bamboo” workshop, organized by Nick Lobnitz and Bob Giddens from Carry Freedom. They have a sweet open-source project on bicycle racks and share their knowledge with everyone planning to build a bike rack.

More news about the ecosk8 project can be seen in almost real time at ecosk8’s open development website.

The Volvo Sportsdesign Award website

Meet Cut and Paste. Like two MCs at a Rap battle, two designers battle live in front of the crowd drinking beer and enjoining the show.

Shoud we call them DCs?

click the image to check the video

Via Cool hunting

Tomorrow begins here in Frankfurt the Bright Skateboard Tradeshow. Business is going to be done between the walls of the old police building. Other than making money you can expect some great boarding during the 3 days of the fair. Earlier this year, at the Winter version of the Bright, a sick bowl with an insane wallride over the main door was built inside the building. This year there is going to be an additional surprise, a rollercoaster like skatepark at the back yard promising some sweet action. I will try to post some pics of the event so check back next week for that.

Until then, keep lovin’ .