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Design lessons from guitar pedals
What we can learn from technology that’s designed to be stepped on
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 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.
So forthwith, here are my 5 Design Lessons From Guitar Pedals:
1) When tech is rugged, it’s a joy to use
Guitar pedals are incredibly rugged.
Their casings are often solid metal, and their knobs and dials can handle huge amounts of abuse. Their components are usually so well-soldered that you can accidentally drop or tumble a guitar pedal from quite a height, and it’ll be fine.
This makes sense, right? Guitar pedals are, after all, a technology that you are supposed to step…
