one shoe – concept design
‘one shoe’ is a concept, personalized, and mono-material shoe that wishes to attend a person’s body needs while being an eco-friendly solution. It combines three main areas of product development, ‘smart’ materials (mechanical meta-materials), generative design, and additive manufacturing, which together
shows the immense potential for the future of personalized footwear. It does that by question current practices of footwear and proposes a solution from a perspective, where the data defines certain parameters of the product, in order to fit people’s physical needs. Also, this project aims to serve as an inspiration and generate discussion towards a new approach to the current fast fashion mindset. It hopes to achieve that by making people think about the products they wear and if these suit the needs required by their bodies. It is my belief, that bespoken products carry a
certain emotional weight since they are custom made, which can make us reflect more on what we buy and how we treat it.
one shoe – from problem to solution
Currently, footwear practices present problems from two perspectives. First, by nature people are different, and no two feet are the same. Yet, people with the same feet size, but with different body conditions such as differences in weight or walking, often wear the same shoes.
Second, unsustainable practices such as the use of toxic glues and combining different materials (e.g foams, rubber, or plastics) are still common in the footwear industry. The combinations of several materials used in a shoe are often linked to its performance or aesthetics. This materials combination
creates composites, which increases the complexity of the shoe recycling process, precluding most of its materials to be reused.
Due to the distinct behavior that each mechanical metamaterial structure has (e.g. expand or contract), it is possible to program the material behavior, as well as feeling, when combining different lattices together. This allows finding solutions that respond to the specific needs of the foot (e.g. a sole that follows the natural deformation of the foot). By combining 3D printing, generative design, and additive manufacturing, while embedding data from the user’s feet throughout the process, the ‘one shoe’ concept was created. This piece of footwear is totally personalized to each of the foot’s wearer and entirely made from one unique material with multi-properties (e.g. softness, stiffness, and responsive behavior). Metamaterials versatility can tackle both problems without compromising the performance or aesthetics of the shoe. This results in benefits for both users (personalization) and society (sustainability).
one shoe – aesthetics
Regarding the shoe aesthetics, its inspiration came from 3D printing textiles, 3D tiles from architecture facades, as well as parametric architecture design. Also, its ‘raw’ look shows all aspects of the technologies implemented init. Essentially, its aesthetic result also manifests the idea of how areas of research, technology, and design can come together to create truly personalized and reusable wearables and, at the same time, establish new means oh aesthetics in the fashion design sector.
one shoe – viability
Most of the technology needed to make the one shoe possible it’s already available. Nevertheless, there is a lot of space for improvement, especially on the software level to generate designs. However, the whole infrastructure and logistics can still be very difficult and expensive to implement. Since I did not make any study to date regarding the whole costs of such infrastructure I prefer to not specify a value regarding the end price of the ‘one shoe’ but rather point it to the price range of other high-end sneakers.
