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PROJECT PROPOSAL

My final project will be a guitar made for people who like making guitars.

I want to experiment with different guitar body materials. I would also like to figure out the way my target user would put together this guitar in order to find out what would work best for them.

I aim to release the design for this product open source at the end of fab academy or at the end of the year. My dream for this plan is to create a community of people to design and make these guitars for themselves and others

This project will also be a part of my major project for my final year of university in Industrial Design. This means I will incorperate more research into this project than would be typically expected. I hope the research will help me understand my project better

I really enjoy designing and creating new musical instruments. I am looking forward to this year!

DESIGN CRITERIA. TARGET MARKET

Musical Instruments are objects of importance to their users Guitar Design has always been an industry slow to change.

The reasons for the speed of change is cause of much debate. Some would say that the current era is the best era, some would say that innovative ideas are hard to buy into with big companies like Gibson and Fender making it hard for small brands to flourish.
While I agree with part of this, I am willing to bet that part of this reluctance to the new is that people are stuck in the in the way things are. This is part of what I hope to change.

Hobbyist luthiers- people who make instruments as a hobby, are the people who could be more open to new innovative ideas. This group generally has a passing knowledge of digital fabrication.Although they do own many of the machines, there is much overlap in the skills associated with guitar design and digital fabrication. It is for this user that I target my final design for.

What does a hobbyist luthier look for in a guitar?This is the criteria for my project:

  1. How the guitar sounds: Why play a guitar if it doesnt sound good? What makes a good sounding guitar is open to debate. My opinion is that a good sounding guitar will fit or create a specific genre of music.

  2. How the guitar plays: If the instrument doesnt feel like a guitar, it simply will not succeed as one. Some new guitars lose a feeling of the way the instrument should handle which mighgt alienates the market user.My instrument should feel like a guitar.

  3. How the instrument identifies: Or how the instrument looks. Different artists and users all look for different things in the aesthetic design of their instrument. I will have to consider how to appeal to a wide range of users when designing my guitar

  4. How the object fabricates: the product needs to be versatile enough to encourage users to experiment with different ways of fabricating it. It also needs to be easy enough to keep people interested in the creation of the guitar