Week 2: Mood Board

In order to aid my research this week I created a mood board filled with images and quotes that I found inspiring or were appropriate to my area of enquiry. Many of the photos came from my interview with Rory Dowling as did all of the quotes on the board: these would remind me of key pieces of information he gave me during the interview. Two of the photos are of the guitars I have made to provide a view of my own experiences of being a luthier. Altogether these images summarise what I think of guitar making; a busy workshop environment, woodworking by hand and carefully crafted beautiful instruments.

However in order to offset this a little and encourage me to think outside the box there are images of more unusual guitar designs, many of them by Japanese luthier Michi Matsuda. Matsuda is a very experimental guitar maker, drawing influence from Japanese culture and incorporating some unusual ideas of his own to make strange and wonderful instruments. Some of his designs shown on my mood board include a guitar/harp hybrid, his own unique take on combining electric and acoustic guitars and an instrument with a rough black pattern created by scorching the soundboard with gunpowder!

In addition to these more outlandish designs there are designs which are not related to instruments but I find interesting nonetheless. Among these is a series of benches created by London based designer Thomas Heatherwick entitled “Extrusions”. With this project Heatherwick aimed to mass-produce benches by extruding the whole thing out of metal. What I particularly like about this design is that he goes a step further and calls attention to the way the bench was made by leaving on the warped piece of metal that is often cut off at the end of the extruding process. Combined these images remind me of the field which I am already besotted with while also encouraging me to experiment and think of more unconventional ways to approach my design.