How wood affects the sound in an electric guitar is a long debated topic among musicians. When one thinks carefully about it, it is actually quite surprising that there is even a debate. The sound of an electric guitar is not dependent in any significant way on the materials used for the body and neck of the instrument. Contrary to what happen in an acoustic guitar, where the sound is the result of a resonance induced by many components–among which, the quality of the wood is of paramount importance!–there is no material-induced resonance involved in the sound of an electric guitar; hence tonality qualities of the wood of the neck and body of the instrument are irrelevant.

The output of an electric guitar is actually an electric signal; its final sound happens only after some magnets called pickups generate a magnetic field and ‘pick up’ the alterations in it created by vibrations of the metallic strings placed above them. Those changes are transformed into small electric signals; they are significant but still too small to produce sound, so they are channeled through an amplifier and then eventually to a loudspeaker.
Given the electronic nature of the sound, it can be altered ad libitum using effects: delay, chorus, overdrive, fuzz and so on: the list is endless.
In simpler terms: the sound of an electric guitar has nothing to do with the natural sound produced when played as if it was an acoustic instrument. The presence of a TV or a mobile phone in the room will do more to alter the magnetic field of the pick ups than the material of the body of the instrument.
Everyone who has ever witnessed what a pick up switch or a pedal does to sound, instinctively knows this is true: wood is irrelevant in regard to the final output.
Given this elementary truth of science, it is fascinating to see how the milieu of electric guitar players is almost unanimously agreeing on the opposite: wood, they say, is–somehow, in some undetectable, indecipherable but still vivid way–a fundamental component of the sound of the instrument! One can find hundreds and hundreds of books, websites, interviews with famous players and guitar makers where woods are examined as more or less apt for their ‘tonality’ in guitar making. And 99.9% of the guitar players will tell you that it is fundamental to hear the guitar when not amplified, as if there were any meaningful relation between how an electric guitar sounds when amplified and when not. There are some who can tell you that certain guitars have a specific sustain because how much they weigh or how the weight is distributed. Some insist that even varnishes or protective coatings determine noticeable differences.
They are all wrong.

Artists can be excused if they mix the playability of an instrument with the output: a beautifully polished maple neck, or a lovely time-induced patina, or a pristine rosewood fretboard might indeed be of utmost importance for individual players. And they might well have very valid reasons to back up their feelings on playability, but that has nothing to do with sound: in a controlled experiment, with all other things being equal, no musician will ever be able to discern the sound of an electric guitar made with a certain wood instead of any other material. But of course, we can forgive artists: their passionate involvement with the instrument, with its craft, is what make them capable of creating art; every guitarist who swear about their beloved guitar having that specific tone because of its paint, or wood, must indeed be excused. They’re blinded by their love for their art.

People who should, perhaps, be less excused are the writers of technical magazines and the guitar manufacturers themselves. It might be argued that they would do a better service to the community by, say, reviewing the quality of material in cables and amplifiers, giving proper credit to these fundamental components of the final sound, rather than indulging in never-ending, scientifically meaningless, debates on the veneer on the fretboards, or paints on the bodies, in articles where, and I quote “tonality of the combination ash+rosewood is results in more tonal brightness compared to the maple-mahogany combo”. Fact is that there is no such thing of tone wood in electric guitars.

In the Tech Talks page of their website (https://www.fender.com/articles/tech-talk/do-different-woods-affect-your-electric-guitar-tone) the producer of some of the most sought-after electric guitars  in the world answers to the million dollar question “Do different woods affect your electric guitar tone?” –perhaps settling it, albeit unwillingly:
Their answer starts by acknowledging that it is “a debate that has waged on among beginners and advanced players for a ling time”, “a muddy situation, as there are vociferous defender on each side of the issue”. And then they add: “those who do not believe wood affects a guitar’s tone point to the physics of how an electric guitar works” (emphasis is mine)
Indeed. Yes. That’s what we all should do. In order to establish the plausibility of a physical fact in the physical world, we should all point to physics of how things work. Nothing else is required. But for some reasons–reasons, alas, that science alone cannot fully explain–so many of us refuse to do so.

Cet article String Theories: Guitar Physics est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

The concept of ‘desire path’ is crucial in wayfinding studies.
Desire paths, also known as paths of least resistance, are the paths created when people walk the same ground wearing down the grass – or leaving any other form of erosion on the surface. They are fundamental features to study as they indicate the preferred (almost always the shortest) route between an origin and destination. Their emergence is the implicit indicator of poor planning. In a famous internet meme (see below) a desire path is shown to represent the crucial difference between Design and User Experience.

In the design of the paths crossing gardens and connecting buildings on University campuses, the preferred protocol is now to wait and observe for one year to see the natural emergence of desire paths and then paved them the following year. Such implementation happened at UC Berkeley and University of Maryland and in many other public spaces.

Students of my Wayfinding Class monitored our new campus on Saadiyat Island and proposed new paved routes following both the observation of  people behaviour and the funny instances of remedial design put in place to contain that.

The emergence of one specific desire path – the consequence of people walking through a batch of grass awkwardly situated on the preferred route to the main cafeteria – generated an interesting debate, carried on via paper notes.
Some students obviously shocked by the fact that people preferred to walk through the grass rather than walk around it, left a paper note next to the path: “Please, don’t kill me! Signed: The Grass”.

It should be noted that maintaining a batch of grass in a campus in Abu Dhabi is way more complicated that in Oxford or Boston; so some emotion in seeing this precious feature being eroded is understandable. Still, the rebuttal that followed is exemplary. Another note, placed next to the previous one, stated: “killing the grass it’s nothing. I am on my way to the canteen: come and see what I do to salad…”

Cet article Mind the grass, not the salad. est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

The welcome screen of most current smartphones is a collection of representations of vintage technologies. There is an icon for the camera that represents an old fashioned camera, ditto for the radio (a radio), for folders (folders), for messages (an envelope), for the planner (a paper planner), for the voice recorder (a microphone), for the clock (an analog clock face), for a lamp (an incandescence light bulb) and for settings (a gear). And of course, an icon for making phone calls (the handset of a phone, or even the wheel of a rotary phone). Other vintage technologies surface iconically in the app folder, we do not even bother to mention them.

Are these icons passing the test of time? For some reason, they survive the near disappearance of the objects they represent – for newer generations, these objects only survive in the icons. A nice design paradox will arise at some point. When all the above mentioned functions will be mostly if not completely absorbed by the smartphone, we may run short of meaningful icons. The only icon will be an all-purpose icon – by definition, pretty useless.

This fate may also be that of objects themselves. As many object tend to resemble smartphones (why?) how are we to represent them iconically in a way that distinguishes them from smartphones?

Cet article The end of iconicity est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

The Mangrovia Rad-Art implement is running just fine!

Somewhere in France, a common problem. Cars and trucks speed through a residential neighborhood. On average, way above speed limit, and way above what is reasonable given the fact that people live there, cross the street, walk their dog. The municipality intervenes with a chicane and speed bumps. Bumps are somewhat effective (but not with trucks, who merrily drive over them: see our post on speed bumps). The chicane is a perfect failure. It only works with heavy traffic. In light traffic – which is the norm in the village – drivers eyeball the car coming in the opposite direction and instead of giving way, well, they accelerate.

We came up with a homegrown implement. An empty box was assembled from Ikea leftovers (see our forthcoming post on the Grand Ikea Abandonment). It measures 60 (height) by 45 by 50 cm, and is mounted on a recycled metallic base, 55 cm tall. It is surmounted by a photo magnifier found abandoned in a town street. One side is missing, so that the implement can be inspected and found to be just an empty box. Regular white diagonal stripes are painted on the extant brown (simile-wood) background, in bands approx 10 cm wide that run parallel to the vertical corners.

The implement has been christened Rad-Art.

Rad-Art has been placed during week-ends immediately after the village’s doors, in the precise point in which the otherwise straight road makes a minimal 10° left turn, and in correspondence of a street sign indicating both the turn and the presence of the first chicane of a series of four. The turn blinds drivers to the road ahead, that they can only visually access when the are 50 m from the turn. At that point, they typically accelerate, either existing or entering the village.

After three consecutive week-ends of placement of Rad-Art, here are some informal observations.

(1) An absolutely significant diminution of the average speed. Drivers even brake when they approach Rad-Art (meaning they are already driving too fast). Diminution in average speed means more safety, less noise, and less pollution.

(2) One case of vandalism (on Apr 22, 2017). The Rad-Art main box was found displaced from its support and put on the ground.

(3) One police intervention. During a routine round on Apr 23, 2017, the Major from the local brigade stopped and discussed with us about the details and the meaning of the operation. He found it interesting and did not discourage it. He said that as long the object was not meant to be a copy of a speed radar, it was not objectionable. As anybody can judge from a comparison of pictures of Rad-Art and standard speed radars used on French roads, Rad-Art makes no attempt to be a copy of the latter. It is a caricature of a mad scientist’s creation, whose absurdity is all the more apparent given the presence of the vintage magnifier. It is safely placed in a protected point, and can be easily and safely inspected by anyone who wants to stop (the chicane protects two usually empty parking spots.) The Major gave us his card and offered to listen to the neighborhood’s complaints about speed. We are presently writing a petition.

(4) A number of conversations with neighbors who share the same concern about road safety.

(5) Conversations with drivers and, in one case, with a cyclist, who stop and ask about Rad-Art. These are in general sympathetic, as drivers appear to live themselves nearby.

(6) According to one neighbor, it may be the case that Rad-Art is tagged on some illegal applications that signal to drivers the presence of speed radars. This would make it work even when it is not physically displayed.

Rad-Art is an artistic performance; it is not an utilitarian object. In particular, it is not meant to reduce speed or to assist traffic control. It is loosely meant to make drivers think about their speed habits, and to prompt conversations, which is one feature of all artworks (see Casati 2004). It is presented here with a CC Zero license, meaning that it can be copied, modified, with no credit attribution, for both non-commercial and commercial uses. The designers of Rad-Art of course take no responsibility for misuse, or for unintended uses, or for uses that may violate local laws, or for consequences whatsoever of the use of replicas of Rad-Art or derivative objects. Road safety is an important issue that no single implement or art performance can possibly address, let alone solve.

Cet article Mangrovia’s Rad-Art est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Writing from Paris T7 line, that takes us from our respective locations to Orly Airport.

Hmm… Orly?

We can count 11 occurrences of the name Orly on this plan. Most are distracting, but at least one of them ¨Pont de Rungis Aéroport d’Orly” is seriously misleading (as it is written in a taller font than the one used for the correct stop).

And may be you can also science-fictionally walk to Zone 4. Don’t get lost there.

Cet article Orly’s Eleven est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

The title of this article is a pun of the famous FedEx slogan of the 80’s: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. 

FedEx is one of the most quoted companies in all graphic design classes of the world. A case history of a near perfect visual identity program, sustained by advertising campaigns and product placement operations without parallel (do you remember the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks?), and, above all, by one of the most clever logos ever designed. The famous blue and orange logo with the ‘hidden arrow’ – can you see it? It is in white between the E and the x – is the mandatory example for logos that makes the most of negative space: a bold big arrow, a vector, the most perfect symbol for moving objects, naturally emerges between the letters that constitute the company names. Simple, effective, perfect.

And how does the arabic version of the FedEx logo looks like? In the last two decades Arabic Logo Matchmaking has become almost a discipline in itself, with hundreds of western brands wanting (when not being required by local laws) to appeal to local audiences by presenting themselves using arabic versions of their signatures. It is indeed a big challenge for a designer to be asked to create the arabic counterpart of a latin logo. Many factors are indeed to be considered from calligraphy styles to phonetics; now you would expect that when a corporation such as FedEx brings its business in the Arab world they would jump on the opportunity to have, once again, a beautifully designed logo; something elegant, neat and precise to match the refinement of the english one. Well, think again.

The arabic version of the Fedex logo is an insult to the arabic script: if you are not familiar with the basic rules of grammar and style, there is probably no way to convey to you how grotesque is the attempt to mimic the latin uppercases using arabic letters, or how pathetic is the way they managed to squeeze an arrow in the letter sin: basically they just chopped away bits of the letters to make an arrow appear. Brutal! And aesthetically horrid. They have another slightly different version of the logo around; it is appalling too.

Now just consider the pictures in this article. They are the outcome of a three hours exercise I gave to my students. They split in three groups and in such a short amount of time they came up with three proposals, all of them vastly superior to the current one. They suggested a new phonetic transliteration and produced designs where the hidden arrow appears out of negative space alone, as in the english one, without flagrant violations of grammar or stylistic norms. Lively accounts of the exercise as seen from students perspective can be read here and here.

Three hours is all that it takes to a bunch of motivated students to come up with a more appropriate arabic companion for one of the most iconic logos in the world. Hey FedEx, do you want their phone numbers?

Here below, one of the most interesting proposals by students Hayat Al Hassan and Taikj Sugita:

Note: Material shown in class is pertinent to the Curriculum and presented to students according to fair use policies. 

Cet article Fedex Arabic: When it absolutely, positively needs to be redone overnight. est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Pictograms have been around for almost a century now, and in the last fifty years they have undergone systematic standardization and refinement. It’s all the more surprising that, for all the theoretical and practical design investment on them, some problems appear to be still unsolved, even intractable. One is the major elevator/bathroom ambiguity.

Let us proceed stepwise.

1. There are complex issues with the bathroom pictogram already – the way genders are represented by stereotypical clothes does not meet universal approval.

2. But the bathroom pictogram (BP) stabilized both the stereotype, and the idea that a gender difference is graphically salient. This meant that it was, and still is difficult to create a gender neutral pictogram for “human”.

3. As a further consequence, the way some gender neutral activities are represented, e.g. activities related to transportation, invite the use of both stereotyped pictograms – man and woman. After all, elevators are taken by both women and men, and elevator segregation is a thing of the past. The elevator pictogram (EP) contains the same syntactic elements of BP.

4. But the power of BP strikes back. It has a much higher historical and visual inertia.

Conclusion: In the worst of cases, you end up in a bathroom if you look for an elevator. In the best of cases, we are left with an ambiguous pictogram. And using BP and EP next to each other does not appear to lessen the ambiguity.

Our recommendation is to leave BP alone (at least for the time being; see 1. above) and to seriously rethink EP. Compromise is possible, as in the example reproduced above. Icons for users of elevators have been cut at the belt, gender is not marked, and some movement is implied in the halved figures.

Cet article The restroom elevator ambiguity est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

In our campus in Abu Dhabi, accessing a building via a five minutes walk can be a very pleasant experience during winter; and a really challenging one in the hot summer months. This is why users have naturally found ‘desire paths’ among buildings: from back alleys to back alleys and so on. Basically a desire path is the shortest or most practical route between an origin and destination.
In the Spring 2015 my Wayfinding Class conducted a survey among the users of our Arts Center and found that one of the main requests was to facilitate the access between the Arts Center and the adjacent Campus Center: the service door in the photo does just that, providing a direct path between the two buidlings, minimizing the outdoor path.

Unfortunately that obvious desire seemed to contradict some preconceived ideas on where the desired paths on campus should be; instead of following the users requests (my mantra: the user is always right) some administrators resorted to Surrealism, as the ultimate weapon against logic and user centered design. Behold the sign on the open door: “this is not an entrance. This door does not open”. But in reality that is a perfectly valid entrance – actually the users’ favourite one – and yes the door does open.

I assume Magritte would have loved it.

We have mixed feelings about it.

Cet article Surrealism: the last resource against user-centered design est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Icons are icons. The Hilton Hotel is an icon. A token-icon, in the sense that there is only one brand around. The smartphone is an icon: a generic icon, as there are many different brands of smartphones. Diversity in the case of smartphone cancels out because of function: one needs an object that can support both holding and reading on screen, the design of shape converges on a rectangle with rounded angles.

Accidents happen. The Hilton Paris Opera Hotel at Gare St. Lazare in Paris, as seen from above, or on a map, has (almost) the shape of a rectangle with rounded angles. Roadwork around the Hilton disrupts the circulation. Signs are posted to help pedestrians find their way. On those signs, the Hilton rectangle is represented by an icon that further simplifies its shape – and is actually the globalized smartphone icon. We witness an interesting and so far poorly documented phenomenon, accidental icon capture. With consequences: The three internal courtyards of the Hilton are reduced to one, and turned into the smartphone’s screen.

Cet article Icon capture est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

There are many ways to remember an artist. The authorities of the Island of Capri have done something quite creative when they decided to remember the german poet and painter August Kopisch, the discoverer of the famous blue grotto of Capri.  An imposing bronze plaque, signed by the Italo-German Association of Naples, is present in the square at the entrance of Capri. Here it is:

The dedication is straightforward: to the german poet August Kopisch, discoverer of the Blue Grotto; so far so good; and then it gets comical with two dates: 1826 – 1976.

Now, the most obvious interpretation is to be excluded: it is unlikely that Kopisch lived for 15o years. And one must turn to Wikipedia to understand the hidden meaning of the plaque: Kopisch was born in 1799 and died in 1853; but those two dates are there to indicate the time of the discovery of the Blue Grotto (1826) and the dedication of the plaque (1976), on the 150th anniversary.

I wonder if it has been a deliberate decision to set in bronze such a plaque: for sure it achieved its purpose.

(Photo: Goffredo Puccetti, 2013)

Cet article Swim well and live 150 years est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.