https://uxdesign.cc/5-design-lessons-from-guitar-pedals-782d41f07d1b
"Last weekend I played my first gig with my new band,
Lipstick Driver. It’s a
three-piece power-trio, in which I play electric guitar, so I’d spent the last
month assembling a new pedalboard.
That’s the board, above! Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent hours and hours
fiddling with those pedals, tweaking and experimenting to get precisely the
range of sounds I need for this band.
While doing so, I was reminded of a conversation I had years ago with Bill
Buxton about guitar pedals and industrial design.
Buxton is a long-time user-interface expert at Microsoft research, and he also
studied music back in the 70s. When we spoke, he told me how deeply he admires
the interface design of musical equipment like guitar pedals.
Their specs, he noted, are incredibly robust — yet they’re also effortlessly
easy to use. Guitar pedals are miracles of user-friendly architecture.
“There’s ‘normal’ spec, there’s ‘military’ spec, and there’s ‘rock and roll’
spec,” he said. “Rock and roll spec has the highest tolerance! It has to
withstand the road, and its ability to deal with human gestures is way beyond
anything we’ve done even with computers.”
This [is] bang on. Indeed, after working with guitar pedals for decades, I’ve
realized that the world of design could learn a lot by observing what’s so
good about these amazing pieces of machinery."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
