CONVERTIBLE CELLO DESIGN
January - April 2017
Our team developed an experimental cello concept designed to improve the affordability, learnability, and playability of cellos for elementary schoolers. We examined the requirements of the children, as well as their parents and teachers, and how they intersected with the advantages and drawbacks of existing instruments. Through a series of ideation sessions, experiments and critiques, we created an innovative acoustic/electric design.
Our first step in finding a design direction was to identify the stakeholders our cello would impact, and determine their needs and priorities. Through contact with music educators, students, and parents, we established a short breakdown of each participant's most vital interactions with the instrument. Ease of transportation, learning, and maintenance stood out as factors of consequence to our stakeholders, so we next set out to explore the aids and impediments that could potentially affect the fulfillment of these factors. As a means of gaining insight to the pain points facing cello learners, we spoke with cellists of a variety of ages and backgrounds about their experiences with their instruments. These pain points, in turn, served as a launch point for ideating design solutions which would meet our user requirements more effectively than existing cellos could.
Our first few rounds of design exploration attempted to directly solve the problem areas we had identified by making small changes to the standard design of a cello. We considered ways of facilitating tuning, adding texture to the fingerboard as a means of tactile mapping, and replacing wood with materials less prone to warping. While useful, these changes offered nothing particularly novel to the market for children's cellos, and the feedback we recieved in design reviews kept telling us to push further.
On reconsideration of our ideas, we realized that we'd been passing over a less traditional technology that already addressed a number of our pain points- the electric cello. While highly beneficial for its portability, versatility, ergonomics, and relative sturdiness, the electric cello has still been shunned by many musicians due to its inability to fit into a traditional orchestra. In the case of elementary school children, including one or more electric instruments in a school orchestra performance would lead to a hassle in dealing with amplification and may put off families interested in the traditional sound of a cello. We wondered if there was a way to create an electric instrument that could be modified, for these occasions, to fit into an acoustic orchestra. What if the bulky acoustic chamber of the instrument could simply be attached and detached at the whim of the user?