The Flatocaster is guitar made from one tool and one material: A lasercutter, and an inexpensive, eco-friendly sheet material called "hardboard" made from eucalyptus. From one $8 sheet I was able to construct the entire body and neck of a Fender Stratocaster-style electric guitar, from raw material to finished product, in just a few hours. No lumber needing to be milled, glued-up, and carved. The guitar required no additional machining to add hollowing to the body, because these details could be cut into the layers. And while the shape of this guitar is obviously referential to a classic design, the shape is almost infinitely customizeable without changing the manufacturing process.

(Contiue reading for ramblings on manufacturing technology and design, or scroll for more photos.)

My very first job in highschool was working in the mill of a guitar factory in Southern California. There was a lot of manual labor going on in there, but this company had also invested heavily in new automation technology - robotic arms that could polish a guitar on a buffing wheel, laser cutters for fretboards, and CNC mills that could cut out the shape of a guitar body out of a single block of wood. At the time, I was quite impressed. But despite all the investment into new technologies, the company had to eventually close this facility and move all of its production to Mexico. How could a company investing in so much cutting edge technology yet still have to close up shop and outsource it's work?

The answer is in how the technology is implemented. 

New, computer-enabled manufacturing technologies present us with an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how the objects around us look, how they function, and how they are made. But all too often these technologies used as a 1:1 replacement for labor, without tapping into their potential for forging new ground in form and functional exploration. This is exactly what happened at the guitar factory.

A guitar neck and body are made of carved blocks of wood. This is because when guitars were first invented in or around the 12th century, that was the best available material and process of manufacturing available at the time. (This material also lends a rich and vibrant tone to the instrument, still appreciated today). A modern guitar factory makes guitars the same way, only now some of them are outfitted with CNC mills that do the carving. The capabilities of that machine are not being used to fundamentally rethink how the object is made, just to provide speed and efficiency gains on the existing line.

What this means is that the exact same object can still be made mostly by hand - since the fundamental form has not changed - in a factory where manual labor is extremely cheap. Like Mexico, in the example above.

So what would happen if instead of just shoehorning a new manufacturing technology into an antiquated process to create a form, you allow the technology itself to drive a new process? What if this could be a way to explore new characteristics of the original object that were not possible before? Could the new object be made more cheaply, perform better, contain new exciting features, and also look exciting and new? These are question attempted to solve by the "Flatocaster".