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.

Ok, this gem is for our Italian readers: Last month in Rome I spotted this lovely example of bad communication in a bank office. 

The text informs the clients that new services are available thanks to new teller machines and that personnel is available to assist. The interesting thing (or, the utterly annoying thing, if you are a designer) is how they chose to communicate this important bit of information: instead of a properly designed panel–ideally in line with the sophisticated visual identity of the bank–they went for an A4 paper, obviously designed by one of the clerks, sticked with tape on the glass. The typography is an abomination: all-caps Comic Sans, apostrophes instead of accents, unnecessarily formal language. On top of that, every line of text is highlighted with a fluorescent yellow marker. At the end there is a signature and the stamp of the branch.

The desire of the writer to be taken seriously is evident. And stil the result is pathetic. They managed to condense in one small paper a remarkable number of mistakes. The bank in question has a logo, a color scheme and a distintive typography: these are tools that provide consistency, authority and credibility to their communication. Anything diverging from that style looks unofficial and less credible. The usage of all-caps (READ ME! I AM IMPORTANT!) and silly typography is again a display of sloppiness that does not add any value to the message. But the true masterpiece is the final touch: let’s highlight every single line! And how? With a fluorescent strikeout. It is only apt to note that a line through the text usually indicates text that should be removed.

Next time I go there I’ll suggest they strikeout the stamp as well.

Cet article We are a bank: everything is important est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Despite the widespread idea that the cold pizza is the holy grail of leftover, it is in fact well known that pizza is to be tasted hot, straight from the oven. Super spicy or extra flavored U.S. style pizza might benefit from a night in the fridge but a classical Margherita, like the one in the photo, is at its best for only a few minutes since it is on your plate. That’s why it is somehow unnerving to realize that when you go out with your friends in the standard restaurant setting, you’ll eat your last slice when your pizza is already getting cold, no matter what: aside of the obvious fact that you cannot swallow your pizza in one bite, conversations will extend the time required to finish your pizza. That’s the way it is. That’s ‘the default’. One interesting solution would be to challenge this default scenario where you all get your pizza at the same time, and actually having them delivered to your table one after another, at an optimum interval. Imagine you and your friend have order two margherita: after some minutes your first pizza arrives; Only one! You cut it in two and you both start to eat it: warm and delicious. As soon as you finish it, the second one arrives, and once again you cut it in two and continue enjoying the superior experience of tasting a hot pizza until the last bite. There are tradeoffs of course: you need to be ready to share, so an agreement on the kind of pizza is needed: it would work fine with pairs, but it would be more complicated for groups. And the waiters might not be so keen in increasing the number of visits to the tables. But still, there is always room to check the default: I am going to try this in one month in Rome. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cet article Food for thought: How to order the perfect pizza – and annoy a waiter or two est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Generally speaking, people sees handicap or disability as a set of conditions – such as an illness or injury – that prevents someone to do the things that other people do. Designers know this is not true: handicap or disability is a product of a condition and the environment. In the photo below, what prevents people with reduced mobility to enjoy the access to the beach is not their condition but the deliberate choice of the architect of this brand new beach resort to prefer steps to a ramp. Nothing else. A person on a wheelchair would easily reach the beach, should a gentle ramp being there, instead of those steps. Blind people would reach the beach by themselves should a tactile path be there; and old people too, had a handrail been installed. And so on.

This is not a photo of a lovely resort. This is bad design and we should train ourselves to spot it as often as possible.

UPDATE, May 13th 2018:

After I posted this, Rotana got back to me with this answer that I am extremely pleased to share:

Dear Goffredo, Greetings from Rotana! Thank you very much for your concern, which we truly appreciate and acknowledge. Please be informed that we are already looking into modifying the beach access and this will be implemented very soon. Kindest regards, Rotana team

Kudos to Rotana for acknowledging the egregious mistake and reacting fast to fix it.

Cet article How to create handicap in just 5 steps est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

You probably know this logo: Louis Vuitton iconic L and V mark. Few symbols in the world can match its worldwide notoriety and allure. From Paris to Abu Dhabi, from Milan to Moscow, there is no capital in the world without a Louis Vuitton store, manifestly located in their more elegant district. It is no mistery that it is one of the most counterfeit brands on the planet, and that LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, the French multinational luxury goods conglomerate that ownsLouis Vuitton) devotes a substantial part of their communication budget to fight the forgers worldwide. The story goes that the design of the monogram itself was an idea by George Vuitton – Louis’son – to make life complicated for counterfeiters; and even the iconic flower and squared patterns that distinguish LV bags and accessories were designed with the same goal. There is no shortage of tutorials on line on how to spot a fake Louis Vuitton and the discerning customer is alerted to check the quality of the leathers or fabrics, the stitchings and many other features in order to ascertain the authenticity of a Louis Vuitton bag. Once again, exhaustive online guides are available. So in example one can learn that if you see the logo letters anywhere truncated by edges or stitchings, that’s a fake: the LV monogram appear always intact no matter the size of the bags or how many time it is repeated in the pattern. Interestingly enough I did not find any mention of a very peculiar feature of the Louis Vuitton logo. A trait that is quite possibly invisible to everyone but type designers. In the images below I have placed red arrows next to the brackets of the L and the V. The bracket is the curved connection between the stems (the long, mainly vertical strokes of the letter) and the serifs, their terminals (the pedestals and caps of a letter, so to speak). Now, in letters such as the ones used in this monogram, derived by the classical roman capitals, we would expect to see perfectly curved brackets connecting smoothly the serif to the stem. That is not the case in this logo: the imperfection in the connections is clearly visible in three instances once the logo is magnified: far from being a seamless transition from a curve into a straight line, we see a bulge where we would have expected a perfectly smooth curve. Sloppiness of the designer? That is highly unlikely considering that through the decades, and with the advent of digital typography, that could have been easily fine-tuned to the highest degree of perfection. A more fascinating explanation is that this logo is deliberately left with a microscopic imperfection to detect forgeries: a counterfeiter using standard letter or templates attempting to reproduce it would probably end with the “correct” bracket design. And the surprises do not end here: there is, in support of this thesis, another very peculiar – once again almost invisible – feature in this monogram that would most likely not get copied correctly by a forger. But this one I would not divulge; let me know when you spot it.

Cet article The (almost) perfect logotype est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Virginia Valian’s Why so slow makes the case for tracking and recording gender biases in our daily life – a way to raise consciousness and attention. Here is a simple device that we implemented in our notebooks. Whenever we attend a meeting, we draw a horizontal rectangular box in the top right corner of the page with our notes for the meeting, we split it into two square boxes, and we write in the left box the number of women attending, in the right box the number of men attending. No big deal: a box, two figures. Try it out and you will be surprised (or maybe not).

Possibly Moleskine and other notebook makers could make it a permanent (light gray, almost invisible) feature of their pages?

Cet article The Mangrovia Collective Unobtrusive Gender Tracker est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.

Research worries – and so do conscious parents – about children’s overexposure to smartphones and screens at large. Remedies go from apps that reduce blue light (not good for your sleep) to coercion. Reducing the emission of blue light may solve the eye and circadian rhythm issue, but makes late night use acceptable. Coercion, well, why not? Parents may need to be reminded that they have a role, after all.

Here is a softer solution: design your own ritual. Send smartphones to bed, at bedtime.

Cet article Good night, smartphone 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.

St Jerome had a large space to work in, but apparently he preferred a little, boxy, office. Possibly easier to heat than the vast hall. Italian Architect Giovanni Michelucci lived in a large villa on the hills of Fiesole; but towards the end of his life he had a small room transformed into an all purpose working place, with drawing cabinet and sofa bed, all woodwork, all within reach. There is something about peripersonal space that we may underestimate when we design interiors.

So when your daughter asks for a room, all to herself, maybe what she is looking for is a box. And maybe she means it. She’d like to have a roof and a window. A lamp. And plants above the roof. The footprint of the box is smaller than that of the table that was used for the plants: it actually saved space in the apartment. It’s a little house within the family house. And it sits, triumphantly, in the living room.

Design: Roberto Casati. Box: Zeiss industries (the packaging originally contained a large microscope. It is assembled in minutes thanks to an excellent system of clips. Sturdy plywood, five-layered.) Litho: Antonio Bueno. Child’s furniture: Paolo Biagini, Fiesole.

Cet article Space is the new box, aka: peripersonal space est apparu en premier sur Mangrovia - design collectiv.