For this third prototype, we used vacuum foam with polystyrene and two plastic spheres to create a base. To create buttons, we connected two touch boards to screws through wires. On one side we created the guitar sounds and on the other side, rhythms. In the middle, two buttons to record rhythms and play over them.

For this third prototype, I learned a lot, Rick guided us for the technical part and Elisa supported me on the product design part. From this week on, we started a real teamwork together, because we needed every member of the team to move forward.

I learned a lot during this seventh week. Together with Elisa we looked for the best materials to use for the base and later for the buttons. The aim was to find conductive materials, we did a lot of testing, with different screws, bolts, nuts and wires.

This week we made a lot of steps and it felt like the project came together. We made round shapes for the interaction with the touch board. This helped Eric not to touch a key on accident, this happens on a flat surface. Eric asked us if it was ok with us to bring some people and talk talk about our project. We didn’t know it was for the national radio (radio 1). They called our project guitar boobs, because the two spheres make it look like boobs.

While working on a prototype, someone heard us talk about the program ableton. He said he produces his own music and did the music academy. He (Kees) helped us a lot with finding the right tools we needed in the program. It is such a big program that even he still finds new features .
At this point it helped that each of us came from different backgrounds. Me working on shape, Audrey on esthetics and Rick on electronics. All together to make a guitar for Eric.

We got different knobs to try out if there where conductive and nice to touch. We ended up with the one we alread had.

Eric invited the radio to meet us. This motivated us because he appreciated our product as a "maker". It's also nice to hear positive sounds about what you're doing. The unfortunate thing was that we hadn't started with the final design yet, so now everything was made of plastic and didn't give the impression that we did have in mind at the end. It also worked motivating to immediately focus on a new design the following week. I found the "guitar boobs" part of the radio to take away a bit of the seriousness of our efforts.

Kees helped me with the difficult program ableton. He followed a separate study where Ableton was the main program of the study. He had solved the 2/3 questions we had to make everything run more smoothly.

This was the week that everything fell together. The technique worked perfectly. We could start thinking about an end product. Now all qualities came into their own, the trust in each other was high and we were present every day to finish our product. The whole project did not feel like it had to be done, but rather made use of the possibilities offered to us as much as possible.