Alien Shoe

This is a shoe concept that I developed as part of a grad class. It definitely got more conceptual as it went. A classmate started referring to it as the alien shoe and it stuck. The brief on this project was pretty simple but covered a lot of ground: design a shoe that has a new upper, a new closure, and a new mid/outsole. 

I’ve always loved when a design can be “grown” instead of drawn. Projects that take on a life of their own and become more than what was originally envisioned are more interesting. I also have been thinking recently on how complexity and simplicity interact with each other. For example, could a complex process or aesthetic produce something with simpler parts or production?

Note: As you may have gathered from the project thumbnail, if you deal with trypophobia, this might not be the project for you.

Defining Some Needs

When users struggle to make trade-off decisions, there’s some good design-nugget potential. Hikers often find themselves in this position, oscillating between heavy boots and lighter trail-running shoes. I figured that talking to a few hikers would be a good place to start.

I cataloged some relevant quotes and grouped them into some need-based themes. I then asked another group how important those performance factors were to them. A way that I’ve found to be useful in ranking needs is to graph them by relevance (how important each factor is) and prevalence (how widely felt each factor is).

With abrasion resistance as a top goal, snake scales came to mind. And with the next two priorities being breathability and weighing less, spider webs also surfaced.

Perhaps a highly-abrasion resistant sheath could be structured like a spider web, but morph into different location-specific patterns like snake scales do. A web-like structure would also remain highly breathable.

Now that we have some design directions, what plays into a shoe that fits well? It comes down to two major factors:

Users report shoes with wider toe boxes as more comfortable. A shoe with a wide toe box and minimal cushioning will rate higher than a plush shoe with a restrictive toe box.
A secure fit comes down to how well the shoe secures to the top of the navicular bone. The best fits create a triangle of sorts that pulls against the rear of the footbed, the back of the heel (avoiding the achilles) and the navicular bone.

To go all in on using the navicular to secure the shoe, I opted for a big, wide strap with cords on either end that feed through a ratcheting hub on either side, exit, and connect over the front. This way, a user could tighten their shoe with a small tug on the cord, and loosen by releasing the ratchets.

A lattice exoskeleton could then be made that scales according to how stiff or robust each area needs to be, like snake scales do. This lattice could be stiffer through the rear footbed and heel counter to provide the rest of the triangle for the navicular strap to pull against.

When it came to providing some impact attenuation (cushioning), I figured that different sized pneumatic chambers could also be scaled proportionally to each region’s needs. While air chambers are routinely used in footwear, they are often embedded within a larger form. Instead of using negative-space chambers, a series of “positive” pneumatic balls could be connected to the upper lattice through tree structures to create a one-piece upper and mid/outsole.

The idea: a one-piece shoe structure (location-scaled web upper sheath, pneumatic balloon-tree midsole, outsole) with a bootie and a quick-pull ratchet strap.

Now that we have our idea, it’s time to get modeling! For this project, I used Rhino to develop geometry for use in nTopology. I started with a size 9D hiking last and trimmed offset layers for each part of the shoe.

Since the “positive” chambers would be located between the bottom of the upper and the outsole, I tweened some surfaces between the two that could be used in nTop to position them.

Once in nTop, I scaled a web structure across the different sections based in how durable they needed to be. I then attached the chambers to the upper footbed and outsole with branching tree structures and merged everything together. nTop is ludicrously good at not breaking when other programs would.

Below are a few renders of the final result. Feedback cut strongly both ways, which I was happy about. I subscribe to Milton Glaser’s idea that “There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and wow! Wow is the one to aim for.” Wow responses are my preference, even if the observer doesn’t know if it’s a good wow or a bad wow. Here’s a couple of quotes from the hikers I originally talked with when I showed them the how the design turned out: