How it started
The Mission
The Design Lab and Puma began a joint collaboration to create a next generation shoe, homage to their self-lacing "Back to the Future" shoe showcased in 1986.
Projects
Meta-
materials
A family of materials called auxetic materials were investigated, as they behave with the unusual property of thickening when stretched which we used to augment shoe support and performance.
Embedded
Technologies
As consumer devices begin to miniaturize, more-and-more was it possible to embed motion sensitive components into the shoe, specifically the insole for gait analysis.
Artificial
Intelligence
At the fervor of machine learning, we took the mission of incorporating artificial intelligence into the materials and data we received from the first two projects, to create a fully responsive shoe.
Product Demos
Meta-Ride
The lab designed a new set of patterns which could be 3D-printed which would behave with auxetic properties, a capability we called Meta-ride.
Future Fit
By creating a multi-structured hierarchical shoe, we incorporated several hardware components such as accelerometers, pressure pads, and haptics.
A major source of innovation was designing a flexible and thin pressure sensitive structure that could be slipped in the insole seamlessly.
Data would be gathered from the shoe, and performance metrics and tracking data would be rendered to a personalized app.
The Design Lab
Where design meets function
This project assembled experts in design, fashion, user-experience, engineering, and many more, a quintessential example of a multi-disciplinary group.
As I left the group to finish my PhD, the team went further and pursued the idea of a biologically-inspired, and even biologically derived shoe, check it out.
How it started
Projects
Product Demos
The Design Lab
