shoes - how we use them. how we design them.

shoes how we use them. how we design them.

book Design, editor

Michael Frederiksen

Texture design Rosa Tolnov Clausen Signe Eistorp Nielsen Helle Graabæk Translation Dan Marmorstein Barnabas Wetton Dany Lytzen Proofreading

Lotte Eggert Kiil

Print

Jespersen Tryk + Digital

shoes - how we use them

Text

Else Skjold

Concept and research Else Skjold Helle Graabæk Photos Helle Graabæk Else Skjold

shoes - how we design them Text and illustrations

Michael Frederiksen

Concept Helle Graabæk Michael Frederiksen Photos ECCO Michael Frederiksen

+ © 2013

Designskolen Kolding/ Kolding School of Design Aagade 10 6000 Kolding Denmark www.designskolenkolding.dk

This publication has been financed by ECCO ISBN 978-87-90775-48-3

else skjold helle graabĂŚk michael frederiksen

shoes

how we use them. how we design them.

table of contents shoes - how we use them 9

introduction real people

10

real places

16

real shoes

24

real favourites

66

perspectives

76

shoes - how we design them introduction

79

intention

83

function

84

semantics

92

feeling

103

visual expression

109

form

110

context

114

composition

122

surface

136

references

144

authors & designers

146

preface this book

introduces a blindingly obvious though seldom seen connection between the work of the shoe designer and the individual consumer’s use of the design as an object of desire at the point of purchase and as a practical element in daily use. The ambition of the book is to delineate and describe some of the key terms around these two fundamental aspects of the life cycle of shoes: how their wearers use and experience them and what processes the designer can use, not least by including the consumer in the design process itself. In other words – how we use shoes and how we design them.

The book is thought of as an inspirational work for designers, design students and others interested in shoe design. It is written in two separate halves turning 180 degrees in the angle of approach with the focus changing from the user’s to the designer’s relation to the shoe.

In the first part of the book, Else Skjold and Helle Graabæk take as point of departure four users’ own narratives about their use and experience of shoes. The reason for this is to research the users’ understanding of shoes and what they are, the background for their purchase choices, their relationship to their bodies and not least how their preferences are formed as well as when a shoe becomes a favorite object. The project is centered on a methodology of wardrobe research where the users organise the shoes in their own personal collections in different patterns which show the connection between the users’ collection and their lives.

In the book’s second half, Michael Frederiksen describes shoes seen from the perspective of the designer: A perspective of potential and possiblity; a blank sheet of paper to be transformed into a finished design. Through seven key terms including parameters from Skjold and Graabæk’s work, the designer’s degrees of freedom are discussed and examined in terms of intention and means of visual expression. In the sections dealing with the means of expression, the designer is presented as an ”operator” deep within the machinery of the design process with a cornucopia of variables that can be adjusted as needed in order to achieve the desired result.

The designer’s creation and the consumer’s reading of the shoe form two reciprocal sides of the overall communication. It is important for us that the two projects result in a unified, practically useful handbook for other designers and give general information about some of the important aspects of shoe design and its importance in daily life.

An important aspect of the book’s graphic design are the shoe textiles and surface textures developed by Rosa Tolnov Clausen, Signe Eistorp Nielsen and Helle Graabæk as an experimental design project. The textiles and textures are used as backgrounds for many of the pages (including this one) and in the surface and 3D illustrations.

We would like to extend our thanks to the former Head of the Department of Product Design Mathilde Aggebo for her enthusiasm and patience. Thank you Lise Skov for your interest and knowledge, and thank you NorForsk for financing the fruitful meetings of the Wardrobe Network.

Last but not least, thank you to ECCO for taking an interest in the wardrobe project and for supporting research in this area of study.

Finally, thank you to our four informants for sharing their shoe collections with us. Without you this book would not have been possible.

Else Skjold Helle Graabæk Michael Frederiksen Kolding School of Design November 2013 6

7

shoes - how we use them else skjold helle graabĂŚk

this project, conducted over a period of five months in 2012, sets out to arrive at a very

basic understanding of how people use, store and maintain their shoes. From the outset, we wanted to create a project that would distance itself from normally accepted logics of fashion and the fashionable, focusing instead on the everyday lives of people as they most typically are when they happen to be busy living their lives and trying to make time for work, family and friends. An important aim has been to contribute constructively to the ongoing academization of the design area, as we have experienced at Kolding School of Design. In this project, we have let scholarly and designerly knowledge converge in a hands-on project with room for experiments. The project presents ideas and templates for how to work with people’s wardrobes, and how to process the often overwhelming material into design-generating ideas. It also represents an attempt to build bridges between theory and practice, in the sense that we have been trying to find dialogic tools that can build shared understandings. Welcome to a journey into the four shoe collections that set the frames for our dialogue.

Else Skjold Helle GraabĂŚk

9

real people why work with users?

Users are not oracles that can provide us with waterproof ‘innovations’ or ideas for commercial use. This is already long established news amongst design researchers and design practitioners. However, by making a close study of users, substantial knowledge and understanding can be uncovered regarding how people interact with objects in their everyday practices. This is knowledge that can be transformed and implemented into new design ideas, which spring out of people’s practical needs, life experiences and deepest dreams. When it comes to our own dress practices, we all possess great skill and knowledge. What is especially interesting, though, is that the kind of knowledge we possess is essentially and radically different from the professional knowledge of researchers and designers. How users express or reflect on their practice of dressing is not directed towards production but rather represents the way we create meaning in our lives - how we sort out, so to speak, our self-perception through what we wear. So, instead of being occupied with the glamorous and spectacular topic of “Fashion”, we were eager to learn from day-to-day routines and practices of the ordinary. We were determined that this project should reflect aspects of dressing that are largely ignored in the production and use of fashion today, as it hastens forward with new trends and fads and moods of the season that disappear again as rapidly as they emerge.

aim and outcome of the project What we found to be consistent in our informants’ wardrobes is how they layer and develop taste preferences over time, preferences that hark all the way back to their youth, or even their early childhood. What we found was that these preferences, be they definitions of physical comfort, or preferences for particular shapes, colours or trimmings, were much more defining for their wardrobes than the changing fashions. Our aim has been to zoom in on these parameters of dressing. Taking the limited scope of the project into consideration, the results can never answer our questions adequately, nor can it be expected to generate packaged tool-kits for others to use. What we do believe, though, is that the project can contribute to the discussions of how we use and produce dress objects, and on what terms and logics we should construct the education for fashion designers in the future.

framework and working method The overall frame of the project - the so-called ‘wardrobe method’ - was developed by Scandinavian and British scholars of fashion and dress in the period of 2008-12. What is particular about this method is that the object of study is what is actually stored in our 10

wardrobe closets. Hence, the method addresses how we store, organize, circulate, acquire, use and discard objects of attire. In this way, the method differs from the way the fashion industry normally operates with users, such as the registration of sales figures or of user reactions at sales platforms and focus-group interviews. What is characteristic about these methods is that they address what people believe they want, or believe they do - which is not necessarily what is really going on. When asked, people rationalize or focus on certain ideas about themselves.

When looking in the wardrobe, the objects that are stored offer evidence about our actual dress practices, also the ones that we do not stop to consider in the course of our everyday routines.

Typically, this touches upon shopping mistakes: objects of attire that we continue to keep in our possession, for some reason or other, but never use. This can also have to do with dress objects that remind us of our past. What can be found in the wardrobe as well is how certain features like a particular colour, shape or quality are repeated over and over again in individual wardrobes, whereas others are not. These features leave some dress objects behind as passive elements in the wardrobe, whilst others are more active. In this way, the wardrobe method can provide a unique lens into the sense-making processes that people conduct in their private homes, processes that are based on their ideas of the world and their personal aspirations.

It can also teach us what people really appreciate about dress objects, once they start using them.

the body

We often speak about clothing in terms of ‘codes’ or signals, with which we communicate with our surroundings. This art of communication requires skills for looking ‘right’ in order to be acknowledged socially. In this project, however, all our sensory abilities are recognized as highly important when we are selecting what to wear. Throughout the interview sessions, there has been a great deal of focus on how some shoes can feel ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to have on. Great impetus has been laid on asking how various shoes affect aspects like the body’s posture, freedom of movement, or feelings of grounding, and how physical sensations are directly connected with the actual materials or shapes of the shoe.

Since fashion design is so often perceived as a ‘look’ these days - whether in magazines, on blogs or in daily conversations - this project tells us insistently that the ‘feel’ of clothing is equally important when we select what to wear. As such, there could be no more appropriate point of departure for this project than to take shoes into consideration, because it is through our shoes that we are connected to our physical environment. When wearing shoes, we are inspired and even manipulated to dance, walk, run or gesture in certain ways. We might take delight in the scent of pure leather in a new shoe, and we can appreciate the sounds generated by what we are wearing on our feet.

11

real people

age and ageing While looking at her whole shoe collection gathered on her living room floor, our informant, Camilla, expressed the experience this way: “But … this is my whole life!” What we have tried to do through our interviews is to make our informants reflect on changes or points of consistency in their shoe collections over time. We have gone about this by simply asking them to work up a biographical wardrobe based on their shoes: from the oldest pair of shoes they are storing to the newest ones.

Looking at a whole collection of footwear that was purchased over a period of 15-20 years, it appears quite obvious, visually, that particular colours, textures and shapes are preferred and sought for, repeatedly, throughout an individual’s lifetime. During the interview process, our informants describe how particular kinds of shoes from their adolescent years still play a huge role when they purchase new ones; how their younger selves and the way they dressed in their youth have continued to affect them throughout their lives. In other words, how their taste patterns have been transformed into versions that fit a more adult reality and self-perception, even if there are consistencies that emerge which are obvious to the eye.

This does not mean to say that our users pick the same shoes again and again. Instead, they find new alternatives or details that correlate with their favourite shoes from their past. Pia, who wore Jesus sandals as a teenager, still prefers to have straps around the ankles on her sandals.

Paul, who rarely wore anything but pointy black rocker boots for 20+ years of his life, in all kinds of weather, still prefers this aesthetics to comfort any time. Particularly interesting is the way the two women in the study have drawn on their preference for practical boots in the textures and trimmings of their more lady-like shoes. Other parameters such as life partner, life situation, economy and occupation might add new aspects, but all four informants still tended to return to what they liked when they were young.

tools for dialogue As we have experienced the academization process at Kolding School of Design throughout the last decade, we find that forming dialogical tools between research and practice is highly important. This entails that in order to be able to make a project like this one function successfully - assuming one is aiming to form a real dialogue in which both sides and their

12

respective reservoirs of knowledge are to be represented and activated - it is necessary to find tools that can be used as a lens through which to see the material from a research perspective on the one hand, and from a design practitioner’s perspective on the other.

In order to do so, we have been looking for templates in design practices and current design research that direct how we make sense of information, and the stuff that we create, use, and surround ourselves with.

From design research, and research in fashion and dress, we have latched onto a sustainable perspective as articulated by Ingun Klepp’s concept of favourites, in apposition with Kate Fletcher’s concept of slow fashion. Regarding these two perspectives in conjunction, we have tried to understand how our informants select or reject what shoes to purchase and wear, while rejecting others. In order to understand the various parameters affecting these decisions, we have looked closely at Patrick Jordan’s four levels of pleasure. Jordan also believes that we can learn from people’s favourites, and suggests how both the sensory and the cognitive experience of an object affect our level of appreciation.

From designerly practice, we have applied the following approaches: First and foremost, we have made use of the method of clustering, a visual mapping technique employed by designers to make rapid design-related decisions. The clustering method derives from the design process, where it is used to visually map inspirational material. Working on boards, the designer or design team can sort the material they have on hand by assembling it into timelines or clusters, thus providing a possibility of spotting patterns or coherences between various elements, before making a design-related decision.

To highlight perspectives of age and ageing, we have applied the idea of the timeline cluster and used it to create biographical shoe collections; with this approach, we have been able to zoom in on changes of taste, as they appeared in the four shoe collections.

Furthermore, we used the concept of the personae to create imaginative collection features built up around each informant.

In this way, we have attempted to construct dialogic tools that would enable us to borrow the perspectives from each other1.

1

For literature references, see p. 144-145

13

physio

real people

psycho-pleasure

Has to do with sensory, bodily experience

Has to do with the level of usability: if we can easily work out how to use a design object, we like it all the more

5th

socio

the fifth level of pleasure When all four of the aforementioned levels of pleasure are present in a design object, it becomes a favourite

socio-pleasure

ideo-pleasure

Has to do with how we wish others to see us; matters of social status; reminds us of people who are dear to us

Has to do with people’s tastes, moral values and ideals; how we would like to see ourselves; aesthetic preferences

jordan’s four levels of pleasure 14

ideo

psycho

physio-pleasure

clustering We have used the clustering method both when interviewing our informants, and in the pursuant analysis of the material. By clustering together footwear objects on the basis of various categorisations, we could focus on various parameters of the collections. For instance, we spent some time looking at Pia’s many brown leather boots, in order to be able to identify why she liked some pairs more than others. We also looked closely into Paul’s black rocker boots, because even though they appeared to be very much alike, they still had different features that separated them from each other, and caused him to appreciate some of them more than others.

We have also spent considerable time looking into shopping mistakes, a category that proved to be highly interesting, because it represented so many inner dreams, fantasies and personal aspirations, which did not always correlate with day-to-day reality. Still, they mattered a lot to the individual informant.

To sharpen the focus of the interview process and the analysis, there were three parameters that interested us from the outset, upon which we built our semi-structured interviews: 1. The body: How do our informants use all their senses when deciding what to wear? - Not only through looking at themselves and their shoes, but also through touching, hearing and smelling?

And how do they use a level of sensing that involves the whole body, and the way it moves and gestures?

2. Age and ageing: How have our informants’ shoe collections changed as they have aged?

How have life’s phases, such as the end of their student days, their career-related choices, their partners, their families, and their habitats, affected what kinds of shoes they have been wearing throughout their adult lives?

3. Inspiration: Where do our informants get inspired to wear what they wear? Is it through magazines? Friends? Colleagues? Family? Hobbies?

jordan’s levels of pleasure Patrick Jordan’s concept of the four levels of pleasure treats the various ways we connect to things. It works as an analytic grid, with which it is possible to separate various levels of appreciation - or even pleasure - that we experience when we use design objects.

Jordan claims that when all four levels are represented in one item, this item then achieves the 5th level of pleasure – it becomes a favourite.

In this way, Jordan’s theory correlates well with one of the most important agendas of this project: establishing an understanding of how people select and use favourite objects - in this case, shoes. With his framework as a tool of dialogue, it became possible to distinguish important parameters from each other, and to share understandings in relation to design processes, and research objectives.

15

real places

inside real homes What one sees inside people’s homes is relatively unedited. It is here that we store all the dress objects we own, which do not always correlate with what we actually wear.

Objects do not lie. Even the worst shopping mistakes might be kept at home for certain reasons that reveal non-reflected motives on the part of the user. They might reveal dreams about what kind of person we wish to be but might never become, or dreams about events that we would like to attend but never will. Or simply aesthetic preferences we have that we do not feel fit with our notions about ourselves.

A typical example is found in Pia’s red stilettos. She bought them because, as she said, she felt at the time of the purchase that she was 25 years old, and woke up later that same day and found she was in her mid-forties: “So I can never wear them”. She is not even able to walk in these shoes, since she never really learned to keep her balance when wearing high-heeled shoes. This is because she wore sturdy and robust-looking leather boots all through her youth. Still, she believes that “every woman ought to have a pair of sexy, red stilettos”. So she keeps them and displays them in her home as part of the interior decoration.

In her shoe collection, she tries to implement, with more or less luck, the sexiness of the red stilettos. But only when a pair of high-heeled shoes correlates in texture, shape and trimmings with the sturdy expression of her many beloved brown leather boots, can she embrace wearing feminine shoes.

16

Traces of Graabæk’s transformation of Camilla’s cluster ’sandals’ from interview clipping to design information

17

real places

Camilla’s winter boots

Thomas’ shoes with laces

18

Pia’s timeline as seen from the front

Paul is looking at his black shoes

19

real places

Practical boots

Fine boots

Sandals

20

clusters from interview with camilla

the clustering process Where do you begin when you enter a personal shoe collection and want to know how it has emerged and developed? The clustering method became the key to finding patterns, coherences, breaks or continuities in the four shoe collections. By asking the informants to look at or try on shoes in various categories, a conversation emerged regarding why some shoes were more active in their wardrobes, while others remained passive.

The categories would emerge during interviews, based on a biographical ‘timeline’ of shoes sequenced according to the time of their purchase, thus displaying the whole collection as a representation of life periods or events. In this way, it became very visually clear how some types of shoes would be purchased repeatedly, and how new types would enter the collection. What also became clear was how each user had developed certain preferences with regards to materials, textures, trimmings or shapes based on objects they purchased in their youth. Diving into each category such as ‘dressy or formal shoes’, ‘practical footwear’, ‘shopping mistakes’ or simply ‘sandals’ or ‘boots’, the informants were asked to reflect on why some shoes were simply better than others. As it turned out, they all had a knack for selecting or discarding, based on their experience on why they like what they do. Using the clustering method, they were asked to put words onto this experience, and to comment on how the shoes matched their life situation, their ideas about themselves, practical matters that affected what they wore, and aesthetic preferences that influenced their dress practices.

During the interviews, shoes within each cluster were repeatedly compared, and the following questions were asked: Why do you prefer this shoe to the others in the same category? What is wrong with the ones you rarely use? What is your favourite in this category? Why? What does it feel like to wear it? What do you like about this and that detail, and is that what makes the difference? The laddered interview technique caused us to better understand our informants’ preferences and dislikes, and connections between similar footwear in the collections.

21

real places

clusters from interview with thomas

Other shoes

Everyday shoes

Fine shoes

Trainers/practical footwear

22

clusters from interview with pia

Sandals with colours

Shopping mistakes

Brown boots

clusters from interview with paul

Fine boots Shoes with laces Favourite footwear

New experiments

23

real shoes

users as ‘collections’ In this third chapter, we will make an attempt to consider each individual informant as a design ‘personae’, whose personal taste and preferences define a shoe collection. What we have done is to decipher the parameters affecting each informant in terms of colour palettes, textures, shapes, sounds, smells, feels and personal aspirations, fantasies or dreams. After this, we have made decisions about what could function as potential design material.

According to Helle Graabæk’s own experience as a designer, this way of working differs from the design personae’s method typically put to use in design departments. Here, she would often start with some very abstract definition of a target consumer: perhaps ‘a young career woman, urban and single, who likes to shop and enjoy life’. Departing from this, Graabæk would work with shapes, textures and colours that correlated with the company for which she was working, and slowly she would add more and more ideas until she finalised a given collection.

In this project, the process she was familiar with was turned upside down. Now, she had to depart from layers and layers of material on each informant, and then slowly work her way towards new understandings. She had to move from very hands-on material towards something more abstract, in order to be able to ‘act’ on the material in a designerly manner.

Even if this process was very difficult at times, she felt that the material of this project provided a much deeper resonance to the personae defining a collection than what she had experienced before, because it included so much sensory experience, real-life practical needs, and inner dreams, aspirations and fantasies. She often reflected on how working with real people made her wish to ‘stay true’ to the material, and not deviate from the experiences and reflections and dreams she had met in the field work situations.

This is the reason that the following pages will present the defining material from each informant and his or her footwear: Who are they? What is particular about their shoes? What would a shoe collection need to include if it were to be built on these features? Through this investigation, we tried to gain a deeper understanding of our informants and their shoe collections.

24

Thomas

Camilla

Paul

Pia

25

camilla

camilla is 48 years old and works as a nurse. In her youth, she was a

very active traveller, and now she lives in a small town out in the province with her husband and two daughters. Camilla is a very skilled consumer of shoes.

She rarely makes any shopping mistakes, so most of her shoe collection is relatively active. She stores and maintains her shoes very carefully.

26

the collection: camilla

27

camilla

cluster: hiking boots/sneakers/shoes for walking a long way

Camilla likes her practical footwear to feel like a ‘second skin’.

cluster: practical boots

In the bottom left corner is her all-time favourite footwear, her ‘Palladium’ boots - she has worn out three similar pairs and is now wearing her fourth. It must be exactly the same model. Notice how features from these boots, such as the sturdy character, the rounded front, or the colour palette, are repeated in the footwear in these clusters.

28

cluster: dressy/formal boots

Here, we can spot two important features that Camilla likes: one is the shape of the heel supporting the boots (top right), which were purchased 18 years ago in Spain. She has named it “the Spanish heel”. This kind of heel is repeated in the boots numbered one, two and four, (appearing respectively from left to right), which she purchased later on. As far as the second feature is concerned, the pair of boots in the middle characterizes her taste for footwear that can be worn as a second skin; these boots are so soft that she can wear them without stockings.

cluster: dress or formal shoes

In this cluster Camilla has combined a number of more important features; seeing as she only started experimenting with more feminine shoes during the last 6-7 years, they have to represent a combination of sturdy and more refined for her to accept them. This is something that she expresses in sentences like: “I try to be a little more ladylike, it fits my age, I’m not a young girl anymore”, or, when speaking about the shoes: “They have it all, the sturdy, the fine, they’re fun and they fit all my clothes. They can be anything, both bold and respectable”. From having taken delight in her beloved red ballerina-shoes, she has continued to pursue her preference for buckles. From her unconditional demand for comfort, she has found compromises in a lower heel, in a plateau or in a sole that is flexible.

29

camilla

In one of her favourite pairs of boots, which she has named ‘the Spanish heel’, her temperament is expressed through her fantasies about Spain where the boots were purchased 18 years ago. About this fantasy, she says:

•

“It’s a bit flamenco-like. Flamenco-shoes have a heel like this”.

•

“I did attend a flamenco evening class in Rønde. I believe I was there three times, and then I stopped. It just wasn’t quite right in this public meeting hall located in the provinces”.

•

“I want raw meat! My husband, he eats a lot of paella”.

•

“I bet I have been a flamenco dancer in another life”.

30

camilla’s favourites Note the resemblance between the two sandals: the sturdy expression, the buckles, and the straps around the ankle. Camilla hates stilettos, sling backs, peep toes and the like: “It’s simply too sweet”. In these two pairs of shoes, she has found a compromise that perfectly matches her ideas about her own femininity.

Another resemblance can be found between her leather boots and her sneakers, in the way that the softness of the skin and the rounded foot make her feel like she has total freedom of movement - as if she were wearing a second layer of skin on her feet … and nothing else.

31

camilla

materials and textures

32

trimmings

braids

33

camilla

cluster: rounded toes

The soles are almost foot-shaped, and the sandal has a curve that keeps the foot in place.

cluster: plateau soles

It is important for Camilla to be able to stand firm (“on a mountain”, she says). This favourite feature she has carried with her in the more lady-like shoes she has started wearing in her more mature years, which is why she prefers cork or rubber plateau soles.

the spanish heel

34

“The Spanish heel”. It stands firm and reflects Camilla’s temper and personality.

characteristic features, shoes for camilla

•

The materials and the fit must be in focus, and the price must not be too high.

•

There should be a carefully balanced composition in the shoes that predominantly presents a “sturdy” expression: great lines, belts, buckles and coarse stitching, rounded toes, and either plateau or wide/square-ish heels.

•

The skin should have a strong and soft character, full-grain leather or leather with a visible structure.

•

The shoes should fit tightly around the legs, primarily the ankle, and can be tightened and adjusted so that they fit perfectly.

•

The sole is flexible and allows you to “stand firmly”.

•

The product has an expression that both looks and feels comfortable.

•

The product embodies temperament and edge.

35

thomas

thomas

is 51 years old and works as a freelance photographer and website producer. In his spare time, he works as a volunteer in a café for homeless people. He recently moved into a huge house together with his wife and three children. Since they moved, Thomas has been working a lot on the house, leaving no money for extravagances. He has mostly been wearing his worn-out running shoes, except for work situations where he needs to dress more formally. When looking at his collection, he says: “I need to pull myself together and buy some new shoes because this isn’t working out. The shoes I have worked in I wouldn’t even give to the homeless people I meet in the café. They would ask me what the hell I was thinking if I came by and asked them to accept them as a present”.

36

the collection: thomas

37

thomas

cluster: running shoes / practical everyday shoes

After a few unsuccessful experiments with other brands and models, he has settled on this Asics shoe as the best one. He has five pairs, the oldest of which are completely worn out, while the newest ones still haven’t been put to use.

cluster: the other shoes

Shoes for various kinds of seasons and weather conditions, and his orange shoes that he never uses: “These ones I had as a ‘hate gift’. But I didn’t throw them out, because I think they are so funny. And if I am ever invited to a Hare Krishna party, which might happen some day, then I have them ready!”

38

cluster: kit for fanø

Thomas works for the tourist association servicing the small Danish island Fanø. When he goes there, he needs these three pairs of footwear: practical boots – for all kinds of weather, running shoes – when he goes riding on his bicycle and takes photographs, and dress shoes – for meetings or photo shoots. The latter category of shoes, which embody his favourite pair in his whole collection of shoes, is the one he likes best, particularly because these shoes make no noises and are rather neutral in appearance. These parameters render them suitable for photographing people, he thinks.

rocker boots

cluster: dress shoes for formal occations

Thomas likes his dress shoes to have hard heels, and it is important to him that he can polish them so that they will shine; this is why he does not like stitching that runs across the toes. They must be brown and not black.

These boots are not currently part of his collection, but he has found them on the Internet and wants to purchase a pair like these for certain occasions, like an AC/DC concert that is coming up. He has had other pairs resembling these since his teenage years, when rocker boots were in fashion: “It was back in the 7th grade that I had my first rocker boots. In the metal shop class, a guy named Michael made these steelthings underneath, so that there was the sound of ‘click-click’ when we walked. We thought that was super-cool. And if you were even more cool, you had a piece of sulphur attached to the back heel so that you could light a match in this way”.

39

thomas

thomas on why he likes his favourite shoes •

“I hate to be in the front, and this is also why I didn’t become a musician. I discovered that it just isn’t me. I’d rather be the one who is in the back”.

•

“In my job, I must be able to sneak up on people. I do a lot of photographing on stage, and it is important that you have some good footwear. It’s very important to stand firmly, not to trip over cables, and preferably be a little discreet”.

•

“If you are dealing with people in your work life, you have to inspire confidence. I like to talk to people before I photograph them. They must be able to sense the kind of person I am. Photographing somebody is a matter of trust. This is why you cannot wear a pair of orange shoes, because then you would look like some cocky Copenhagener”.

40

thomas’ favourite shoes

What characterises his favourite shoes? The soles are soft, unlike the ones on his formal shoes.

The sole is also soft on his “hate gift” shoes, but their colour draws all too much attention, so they would never work in connection with his job: “If I am standing at some festival on the stage with my camera in these shoes, I would be shown on a big screen, and that‘s not what I’m there for. I come there to be invisible, and in order to be that you need some black clothing, and it is important that you have some good shoes in which you can stand firmly, so that you don’t trip over a cable”.

Thomas’ “hate gift” shoes

41

thomas

materials

trimming details

Most typical for Thomas’ shoe collection is his preference for laces.

Apart from this he has a few dressy shoes in leather for formal use, and sports- and outerwear shoes for practical purposes.

42

Thomas has a concept he calls “polish-direction”. He does not like to polish shoes with stitches across the nose of the shoe. The four pairs above all have stitches and lines that follow the length of the foot. Below are his suede shoes that do not need polishing, and therefore he doesn’t care about this issue.

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thomas

everyday

Reality versus dreams. For the last couple of years Thomas has been renovating his new house, and has therefore mostly worn these old running shoes. Now, he dreams of buying a pair of Western boots (“if AC/DC comes around for a concert�), which reminds him of the rocker boots he wore as a teenager.

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dream

characteristic features, shoes for thomas

• The sole is soft, can provide a firm base of support and makes no noise.

•

The expression of the design is toned down and discreet.

•

The colour palette is restricted to black and brown.

•

The shoe’s toe is rounded.

•

There is no stitching going across the foot.

•

There is a sharp distinction between everyday shoes and party shoes.

•

There is a high degree of comfort.

•

The shoe closes around the foot.

•

Exceptions: ‘rocker boots’ in leather that can be polished – cowboy-boot type, and shoes for formal/dressy use in lighter shades of brown.

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pia

pia is 51 years old and is the head of a midwife consultant agency performing 3D scanning. She lives in a big

house in the provinces together with her husband and three teenage kids. Pia has a lot of shoes – this is only half of her collection. She stores them around and about the house, in order for her husband (and maybe also herself) not to notice how many shoes she really possesses. Pia is extremely fashion conscious, but still has practical matters to consider in relation to her work and her passion for comfort.

46

the collection: pia

Just as Camilla, Pia has experimented with wearing more feminine shoes in her youth without much success, but has started wearing more lady-like shoes the recent decade. Notice the many brown leather boots that she absolutely loves and returns to again and again.

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pia cluster: pia’s favourite shoes

Pia’s favourite boots and shoes. During her late teenage years, she wore her Harley Davidson boots (as can been seen at the far left, in the third row from the top) with leggings, a tight long-sleeved T-shirt and maybe even a tutu or a mini-skirt. As the years have progressed, Pia has started to wear more feminine shoes - but they have to mirror certain qualities in her boots before she really likes them. Note the similarity in the colour palettes, her preference for thicker qualities of leather (if not full-grain leather), and the sturdy expression of the design. Note also how her present silhouette mirrors her ‘young’ silhouette even though some elements, like the tight-fitting long-sleeved T-shirt and the tutu, have come to be replaced because her physique has changed in the course of time.

cluster: pia’s favourite boots

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cluster: passive, dressy shoes

In Pia’s shoe collection, there are quite a number of “shopping mistakes” and passive shoes. Here the cluster of passive, dressy shoes. She has tried to use some of these, as can be seen on her wedding shoes (at the top, on the left), which used to be white. Even though she coloured them black to make them ‘less sweet’, they never really worked out for her. As far as the three pairs of red shoes are concerned, they articulate her idea that a woman ought to have a pair of sexy red stiletto-heeled shoes. But since she has never learned to walk in high-heeled shoes, and since the quality and colour are mismatches with respect to her preferences, she has never worn these shoes.

cluster: active/passive doublets

The cluster of active/passive doublets (two pairs of one and the same model of shoe or boot – which Pia purchases for purposes of having an extra alternative or “backup” pair, in addition to the “original” pair); the passive doublets can be seen on the bottom line.

When Pia finds something she likes, she often buys a doublet in another colour. However, she seems to prefer the original, as she rarely uses the doublets. She says they have the wrong colour, or that they are simply too boring.

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pia

The greater part of her collection of boots, showing how she has tried over the years, with more or less success, to find just the right model.

Pia’s Marc Jacobs boots, with crude rubber plateau soles and fabricated in full-grain leather, combine everything that she appreciates and needs in a boot: “These are my favourites. It is Marc Jacobs that I bought in Copenhagen in Nota Bene. And this crude rubber sole that doesn’t make noises, and feels soft to walk in, and has this heel that is higher than in my other boots. They were a hit. So, so cool! They are ‘sturdy’ and yet they’re also refined. So I have been very, very happy about these boots. They are worn-out now”

50

Though Pia has never worn her red stilettos, they still represent her idea about femininity and sexiness, ideas she tries to implement in her shoe collection. As the quotes below reflect, these shoes exemplify a dilemma that corresponds with her preferences, which is why she cannot wear them.

positive features •

”I always wanted a pair of red stilettos. Who hasn’t?”

•

“These ones, it is only because I think I always wanted a pair of red stilettos. I think they are sexy. I think they are beautiful. I think that you can use these for everything”

•

“I really like to have something no one else has. I want to be the first with everything.

So I don’t go out and buy a pair of shoes because everyone else has them. Quite the contrary.”

•

“I have put on 10 extra kg now – but then you feel 2 kg slimmer when you wear a high heel shoe. I feel small and broad when I’m scrunched down there - it’s just a sensation in the body.”

•

“I cannot wear flat shoes at a party. I am 1.75 cm tall, so you might think that I could, but I have to get lifted up just a bit higher, so that I feel thin.”

negative features •

“When I was out partying and wanted to be feminine, I wore a nice dress and some sturdy boots. I was never into high stilettos or anything.”

•

“I could never wear anything that is uncomfortable. I would never suffer in a pair of shoes.”

•

“Either it’s flat shoes or it’s very high shoes. It has always been my problem that there isn’t anything to choose from.”

•

“It is simply because I never learned to walk in high heels; this must come from my early youth when I wore all those Harley Davidson boots.”

•

“What I have worn out when I look at all this are the brown shoes with a semi-high heel. And this type of shoe represents my attempts at being a little more feminine. So in reality, I might just be a little boring. Or maybe I’ve had a style that is all my own.”

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pia materials

Materials and colours that are dominant in Pia’s collection, and particularly in her boot collection: full-grain leather or more soft types of skin.

colours

Pia has experimented with shiny surfaces and colours, but she rarely uses these shoes. However, she has succeeded with the beige Stella McCartney sandal where the colour is in the same family as her favourites.

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The displayed boots represent a period of app. 30 years and shows Pia’s favourite boots. All the boots have a sturdy character and are in brown or natural colours made of full-grain leather.

As Pia tells about these boots, she emphasises the names of the expensive shops where she purchased them, and the name of the brands. This means a lot to her.

brands

Harley-Davidson

Harley-Davidson

Freye

Marc Jacobs

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pia cluster: favourite dressy-formal shoes

At the top are favourite sandals. Notice how they are all in toned-down colours and have a relatively low heel, or plateau.

Pia finds it very feminine with straps on her ankle, as this reminds her of how it felt to wear ‘Jesus sandals’ in her youth.

cluster: passive dressy-formal shoes

Shopping mistakes. Here, the colours are more bright and glossy, and she finds them too “sweet” in shape, texture and trimmings. However, they represent her idea of being sexy, which is why she still keeps them. Actually, she displays the red stilettos (far right) in her home.

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characteristic features, shoes for pia •

There is a certain weight and a certain sturdy character in the design, so it doesn’t become all too ‘sweet.’

•

There is a relatively limited colour palette: mostly brown, slightly green (“I have green eyes”) and a few yellow items and surfaces.

•

The sole is ‘silent’ because of her work as a midwife - shoes for partying are allowed to make clicking noises.

•

All sandals must have narrow straps on the ankle, and medium-height heels, such as a plateau.

•

There could be a concealed height in the more practical shoes like the sneakers.

•

The quality of craftsmanship is high.

•

The shoe is of an expensive brand, and/or sold in a store with high price range.

•

There is a focus on small design details like colours on the sole, patterns inside the shoe and the like.

•

It is possible to obtain the same model in more than one colour.

•

The colour red is incorporated so subtly into the design that she feels she is wearing a sexy red stiletto. But it has to be implemented in a less feminine shoe.

•

A high priority is given to the comfort of the shoe.

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paul

paul is 52 years old and lives in Copenhagen with his wife and

two daughters. He is a part-time musician, and the other part of the time he works as an assistant at an architect studio. Paul has a quite flamboyant wardrobe, which he combines with black boots and shoes. Everything he wears has been meticulously picked out in designer shops - preferably in Berlin or London - and he puts aesthetics over comfort at any time. Paul takes very good care of his shoes and wears them until they are completely worn out.

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the collection: paul

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paul

cluster: rocker boots

paul about rocker boots “I love rocker boots, I really do. And I really appreciate that they have had a renaissance in fashion, because then I can wear them again and it is all right. This goes all the way back to when I was a hippie when I wore Sami boots and stuff like that. But even if I was a hippie, I was a stylish hippie, you know. And I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror making myself look really sloppy.

Why are the ones above his favourites? Firstly, the toes are pointy, the way he likes it, whereas the toes on the boots pictured below on the left are too round, and the toes on the boots pictured below on the right are too long, which is why he calls them ‘Charlie Chaplin boots’. The pair of boots pictured on the left are boots that Paul wears at more formal occasions, since he believes that the whole expression of this boot is more elegant and ‘classic’ than that of his favourite pair; this is due to the softness of the skin and the stitches on the front. The ones on the right express his attempt to find something more comfortable, but he thinks they are too boring and anonymous and wears them only at work – never at a party.

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cluster: the other shoes

”The other shoes”: for most of Paul’s adult life, he has worn rocker boots or pointy shoes all year round, in all kinds of weather and in all contexts of life. However, in his later years, he has started experimenting with more comfortable kinds of footwear, which still need to fulfil his demand for designer details and style. Only at home, in the sports centre, or in combination with very particular clothing items, does he allow himself to wear something that is primarily comfortable, although everything is still picked out very meticulously.

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paul

paul about his most passive shoes About his most passive shoes, which reflect his predilection for the flamboyant and extraordinary, he says:

•

“I think they are like a sculpture to look at, for sure, but it’s really hard to match them with an outfit”.

•

“I don’t wear them much, because I really have to be in the mood to wear them, or have a matching shirt or something else that matches well with them that causes me to think: well, here it might be cool to wear them”.

For these reasons, and also for the reason that his wife really doesn’t like them, he wears these shoes only on rare occasions, but he has never considered getting rid of them.

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paul about his favourite shoes •

“Since the 80s, I have basically been wearing the same types of shoes.”

•

“I’m known for striding around in something that is truly unpractical.”

•

“There is something 80s about it. We all peak and, you know, it’s like, the decade you peak, where you find your style, you carry it with you, totally 80s – this is what we carry around, it’s like your aesthetics.”

•

“But I haven’t been good to my feet. I really haven’t.”

•

“I really have a hard time with round shapes in shoes. I really do.”

•

“If I must have some shoes, they couldn’t be different from these, which look like this. And there are many that look like that, but they are not as cool as these. I think they’ve got something, the other pointy ones. Oh, they are too round. These are just right. Or they can be a bit too pointy, or a bit too shiny or something”

•

“What I think they signal is ‘foxy tomcat’”.

•

“But my feet aren’t very pretty, and my nails and stuff. You can tell that all these pointy shoes have damaged my feet. I’ll admit that”.

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paul

a good shoe for paul: a comfortable shoe disguised as an uncomfortable shoe?

+ Several times during the interview, Paul mentions how he places his shoe inserts so that they provide maximum comfort in his rather uncomfortable rocker boots. The question is if it would be possible to create a shoe with the preferred look, but with a level of comfort that he has in his felt slippers?

62

=

?

materials and colours

63

paul

At the top: the classics. These are the kinds of shoes and boots that Paul always is on the look for.

They make him feel well and cool, and in sync with his personality.

Below: in the latest years, he has experimented with more comfortable alternatives, as his feet are starting to hurt after all the years in rocker boots. However, he will only wear these types of shoes under very specific circumstances, as he is out of his comfort zone.

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the past and present or the present and future?

characteristic features, shoes for paul •

The aesthetics of the shoe will always predominate over considerations of comfort.

•

The shape, material and colour refer to the New Wave movement of the 1980s - concretely or indirectly – in the form of:

1 - The colour palette is limited to black - very dark brown.

2 - The nose is as sharp as possible, but not too long (not beyond the toes).

3 - There is a small heel, made out of hard material (no rubber soles).

4 - Using two types: an ankle boot without laces or a shoe with laces.

•

Another feature is that it is a product not everyone can get hold of – there’s evidently difficult access to the sales platform for the shoe (specialty stores in London and Berlin)

•

Yet another feature is that, in addition to this type of shoe, other types of shoes can be implemented in the collection, provided that:

1 - They are used only inside the home or in other enclosed spaces, such as sports centres.

2 - They make direct references to the New Wave movement.

3 - They can be recognized by others as being in vogue or as possessing a high quality in their design.

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real favourites informants as ‘collections’ The material shown in this chapter could very well resemble a “mood board” you might see at any design department, which typically displays an atmosphere, a colour palette, a few quotes, and practical or technical design information. Based on this, the designers will be better able to make design decisions, and work towards a finalised collection. So what’s the difference between working with a muse, doing business as usual, and working with material from informants?

First of all, types of information that have to do with user experience and actual user needs are present in our material; types of information that are not often part and parcel of the more abstract working processes going on at a design department. As we see it, some of the most inspiring material to work with has been the inner fantasy worlds that our informants have in relation to their shoes. Consider Thomas, who wants a shoe that can tip-toe in a hushed fashion, without making a sound. Or Camilla, who dreams that she is standing on the Spanish pampas when she wears her favourite boots. We also find that it has been inspiring to see the connections between objects purchased over time, since various features functioned as red threads in each of the collections.

Making use of the material in this way is a potential eye-opener for both the practical everyday needs of a person, and this same person’s beliefs, values and self-perception. However, being bound by such hands-on material can also entail putting strong constraints on a designer, and proceeding in this way might not always work out.

In the next chapter, we will therefore look into other ways of understanding and processing our material.

why do shoes become favourites?

For a shoe to become a favourite, it has to satisfy important dreams, needs and ideals of a user.

If a particular user like Camilla does not happen to be interested in a brand name, but more in the design qualities of the shoe, it need not be of any one particular brand. For another user like Paul, however, it might prove to be very important that the shoe is hard for others to get because they are very expensive, or because finding them is very time consuming, or both.

In the following, we have analysed the four shoe collections and mapped them onto two grids, which are based on the dialogic tools we were employing from the outset: Jordan’s concept of favourites, and a timeline perspective highlighting both favourites and shopping mistakes made throughout our informants’ lives. Thus, we are widening the ‘personae’ perspective here, and trying instead to regard our informants as segments with various significant characteristics that can be generalised.

jordan’s levels of pleasure The idea of defining design qualities that are based on exemplary informants’ daily routines 66

stems from the way that Jordan has been working with users of mobile phones. His grid which he calls the four levels of pleasure - can provide a key to separating these qualities, concomitantly helping a designer to zoom in on specific features.

Thus, the following pages represent a way of pinpointing what values and needs would have to be fulfilled if we wanted to design a shoe collection based on the preferences of the four informants, if they were seen as representative of particular consumer segments. We are now departing from the patently hands-on level of working that we were pursuing in the previous chapter, and crossing over into a more generalised field.

As can be noted, the level of psycho-pleasure is largely irrelevant to the situation being examined, even though this is a level that has been highly interesting to producers of technical gadgets or software. However, since we are not dealing with ‘super users’, like athletes, with very particular needs and concerns, there are hardly any interfaces that can conflict with the user’s needs in relation to usability or technology. When our users look at their shoes, they certainly know how to put them on, how to tie the laces, or how to pull up the zipper. There are no technical conflicts being encountered here.

With regard to the remaining levels, it is obvious to see how the informants differ in their preferences: the yellow area enhances each informant’s favourite footwear. As can be seen on the tables, all the favourites are assembled in the middle, confirming Jordan’s idea of a fifth level of pleasure, where all the levels coincide and converge. However, the yellow area is positioned somewhat differently, seeing as it is affected by differing attitudes to features like personal ideas related to aesthetics, physical comfort, and social values.

reflections On this level, the four informants are perceived as keys for enabling the construction of frameworks around a deeper consumer understanding. Working with Jordan’s four levels establishes possible new guidelines for a company or a design department that could potentially inspire such an enterprise to target and understand various segments more precisely.

If we look at a company like ECCO, an obvious user profile to work with would be ‘Camilla’.

For her, the demand for physical comfort is unconditional, and ECCO’s top expertise and concern lies in creating comfortable shoes that are supposed to suit her needs. The price level of her shoes matches this company’s price range. The types of shoes she buys correlates well with ECCO’s collections – as a matter of fact, she is the only person in the project who actually owns a pair of ECCO shoes.

By looking closely at Camilla’s dreams, values, life conditions and physical needs, her purchase patterns, and the design components of her favourite shoes, ECCO could find a deeper resonance when they aim for matching certain consumer groups’ wishes and needs and preferences . By looking at non-correlating consumers like Paul, Pia and Thomas, the company might obtain ideas about how to attract new consumer groups, or the segment of consumer groups to which they might wish to gain access. As such, this level of analysis could very well be an eye-opener for understanding new markets, or for understanding already established ones even more profoundly.

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real favourites

socio pleasure

psycho pleasure

physio pleasure

ideo pleasure

camilla 68

socio pleasure

psycho pleasure

physio pleasure

ideo pleasure

thomas 69

real favourites

socio pleasure

psycho pleasure

physio pleasure

ideo pleasure

pia 70

socio pleasure

psycho pleasure

physio pleasure

ideo pleasure

paul 71

real favourites

active shoes

1980

1990

shopping mistakes and passive shoes

2000

2011

To be noticed here is how her passive shoes represent a low amount of money, since these are shoes she had as a present from others, or shoes she purchased cheaply in 2Hand shops. She is very confident when she buys shoes, and claims she can tell just by looking if a shoe will be comfortable to wear.

active boots

1980

1990

2000

2011

shopping mistakes and passive boots

camilla

72

timeline analysis

In the tables on this and the following page, the shoe collection of each user has been positioned according to two parameters: 1) Time of purchase 2) Passive or active shoe

In this way, patterns of purchase and the development of taste patterns are rendered visual. It is obvious that some of the shoes have been worn out and are no longer part of the collections - as has been indicated in the table for ‘Paul’ - but still, the tables display how the collection has been developed over time.

active shoes and boots

1980

1990

2000

2011

2000

2011

Notice how Thomas is a person who wears his shoes out, before he buys new ones. No shoes are more than app. 10 years old. Notice also how his collection is highly functional; he has what he needs, nothing less, and definitely nothing more.

passive shoes and boots

1980

1990

thomas

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real favourites

active shoes

1986

1990

shopping mistakes and passive shoes

2000

2011

Notice how many passive shoes and shopping mistakes are represented here, of very costly shoes. Pia can be a very impulsive shopper and prefers high quality and exclusive brands, but always returns to her favourites.

active boots

1986

1990

2000

2011

shopping mistakes and passive boots

pia

74

favourite boots

1980

1990

2000

2011

2000

2011

The favourite 1980’s style rocker boots that Paul has worn since he was very young. In the timeline, this is marked with ghostlike boots of the same kind, as Paul always wears out his boots completely. He takes very good care of them and has them repaired again and again until they must be discarded.

shoes and boots for ‘restricted use’

1980

1990

The alternatives he is now experimenting with, and his passive, flamboyant shoes. Paul has very restricted regulations for when to wear these shoes.

For example, his running shoes must only be worn in the gym (even if they have been very expensive),

paul

75

perspectives reflections The tables display how some consumers, like Pia, purchase far more than they use. The purchase in itself seems to constitute a pleasurable experience. And it also displays how others, like Thomas, actually purchase too few shoes. In this respect, this level of analysis can constitute a further way of understanding various consumer groupings, through the deeper understanding of types of consumers.

The tables also display how life phases like ageing processes or various and changing economic situations affect people’s patterns of consumption. For instance, Paul has been experimenting with more ‘sensible’ shoes in the past few years, just as Pia and Camilla have started wearing more feminine shoes only within recent years.

If we look closer at Camilla and Pia, their timeline grids are very different. While Pia’s passive shoes represent a value amounting to more than a thousand pounds sterling, Camilla’s passive shoes represent a value amounting to, perhaps, a hundred pounds sterling in all, perhaps even less. Another point that is worthy of note is that while Thomas and Camilla are exceedingly occupied with comfort, Pia and Paul are more interested in the signal-value of brands and exclusivity.

One common denominator, however, is the way in which the four users develop their aesthetics over the matrices of familiar themes, as was indicated already on the first level of analysis. These parameters, which must be met and satisfied in the design of a shoe if our informants are going to like the shoe, have been developed all throughout their adult lives, and often stem from styles that they preferred during their adolescent years. What felt right at that time still feels right, whether it has to do with kinds of material, shapes, or other design details. The tables reflect how we basically search for alternatives for the same, for the ultimate favourite model, which encompasses everything that we need and wish for.

New types of shoes might be introduced because of physical changes in our bodies or because of changes in our lives, but we still tend to look for the same things, over and over again.

favourites are sustainable The fashion industry works with very short delivery schedules, as compared to related areas like architecture and industrial design. The time for the product development of fashion design is limited to perhaps a few months, maybe even less, before styles for a new collection have to be finalised and presented at the seasonal fashion fairs. In the case of footwear production, there is slightly more space for product development than what we can see in the case of clothing production. But even so, footwear producers have to deliver new collections each and every season as well. The speed at which new collections are produced and disseminated has increased dramatically over the last decades, leaving a large part of the industry to deliver so-called ‘fast fashion’: dress objects that look right, but are produced cheaply - and fast.

This is what is referred to as ‘The Fashion Paradox’, in relation to issues of sustainability. As long as fashion is produced and used only to be discarded and replaced by whatever is new, and in such rapid haste, this is going to have a long-lasting downside effect on our environment, and on the way we perceive ourselves through what we wear.

When looking at how our four informants interact with their respective articles of footwear, we find that this poses serious questions in the face of the aforementioned grids of logic: We have found that our informants continuously look for the same textures, the same colour palettes, the same levels of comfort and the same aesthetic expressions, all throughout their adult lives. Their taste patterns are formed in their adolescent years, perhaps even earlier on, and they are highly 76

influenced by their sensory systems: how their footwear feels, sounds and smells appears to be just as important as the visual features of their shoes.

By highlighting this fact, we are aiming to pose questions to a highly visually oriented fashion industry, where everybody appears to be obsessed about getting the right ‘look’ out to consumers, quickly - even if qualities related to physical comfort are sometimes being compromised in a competition revolving around price and speed.

from ‘super users’ to ‘ordinary people’; a potential What can be revealed by such a small-scale qualitative study like this project? Obviously, it cannot confirm any ideas and reflections or say anything representative about large segments of the population. What it can provide is a tell-tale eye-opener about why and how people interact with their dress objects as they do. As such, it can serve to widen our scope of knowledge about consumers of dress and fashion at large. As long as the use phase of a product is unknown, a company cannot act on how its objects are actually being received, used and experienced inside the consumers’ homes. Their actions and strategies consequently come to be based on hunches and vague ideas – it’s something like finding one’s way around in the dark. Still, this is what many companies are doing in the fashion industry, and there might be more reasons for this: In the mid-2000s, cognate areas of design practise moved into working with user-driven innovation, but the fashion industry never really latched on to this development. There might be a number of barriers that serve as partial explanations for this. It was especially the concept of user-driven innovation that became popular in the production of technical gadgets, software programming, pharmaceutical products, and elite sportswear. Here, the basic idea was to find ‘super users’, who could test products, or even help develop new ones. If these ‘super users’ were happy about the product, it stood to reason that a lot of other consumers would be satisfied as well. All in all, ‘super users’ were perceived as oracles of a kind who could help the design departments create products that were a “hit”. The problem with the fashion industry, however, is that it is very difficult to come up with product innovations. In fact, it is highly difficult to take out a patent on a fashion design product, since the entire industry is based on copying. This might have been the greatest barrier that would explain the absence of user-engagement in the fashion industry, since there seemed to be no particular incentive for moving into this area.

What we propose with the present project is to turn the focus upside down: instead of looking at ‘super users’, we suggest looking at ordinary people. There are more reasons why this might be a more interesting approach for the fashion industry. Firstly, though there is a lot of research going on in consumer culture studies and in design research about how people use and experience design objects in general, the topic of everyday user experiences related to fashion design is heavily under-researched. Thus, this project is a pioneer project alongside others that have been going on these years, projects that are starting to lift the veil from what is happening in the homes of fashion design consumers – not only the spectacular and trendy consumers, but also the majority of fashion design users.

What we have found is how sensory experience and inner, imaginative worlds mean a lot to our informants when they are selecting what to wear, and how dressing becomes an identity project that unfolds over time. It is not possible in this small-scale project to answer the question of what this information can be used for, exactly, in the fashion industry and in fashion education.

However, we contend that we might gain new insights by embracing a more reflected view on users of fashion and dress than what is currently being practiced.

We sincerely hope that this project will generate reflections – in industry, in educational institutions, and in your wardrobes as well.

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shoes how we design them

michael frederiksen

human creativity is like a wild animal caged in a black box. We can hear growls and

roars coming from it; we can feel it shaking and rattling when the animal starts going crazy. We can imagine what is going on inside, but in reality we have almost no idea of what is actually happening. But we certainly know that we aren’t dealing with one of Schrödinger’s half alive or half dead cats. Using the right tricks we can tempt and tease the beast into a state of crazed creativity that, with a good portion of common sense and a strict work ethic, can be transformed into productive design activity.

On the other hand, such a great deal has been said about the professional designer’s creative process that it can almost seem to be so well understood that it becomes a kind of refuge we can return to. We have been in it, project after project, lived with it and harvested its sweet fruits.

It is as reliable as a piece of industrial machinery that simply needs to be oiled now and then to deliver a constant stream of innovative ideas and seductive designs. So reliable in fact that we forget that the powerful engine of the machine is the wild, unknown animal in the black box.

All we do when we work methodically with design development is to provide the framework that gives space and nourishment to this innovative wildness. By understanding what the favorable conditions are for liberating our own creative forces and by using methods that can create such conditions, we can mentally lean back and let our rational consciousness look with fascination at the wild animal performing its dark arts.

An important precondition for accessing these powerful mental resources is a deep understanding of the intention of the project in question and the potentials it opens. What do we want to do? What are we able to do?

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shoe design - from intention to visual expression

intention In this part of the book, the intentions and possibilities are collected together in seven sections that each refer to the seven overall core terms: function, semantics and feeling - each containing an aspect of the designer’s intention - and primary form, context, composition and surface, forming the frame around the designer’s visual means of expression.

The thoughts in this part of the book take the author’s own design practice as its starting point and builds on experience from a number of projects working with ECCO design projects for students at Kolding Design School, in which all of the three authors have been involved. This part of the book is also coloured by the content and results of the book’s first half.

The title Shoes – How We Design Them could hint at a complete description of what is involved in the process of designing shoes, but of course, this is far from the case. Nonetheless, the hope is that the coming pages can give a multi-faceted picture of the space in which shoe design is created and thereby inspire coming designers and design students in their work.

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feeling

Whereas the first part of the book observed users in their real life, this section will concentrate on the general working practice of a hypothetical designer. It is a design-oriented, unscientific and incomplete mapping of the underlying conditions of designing shoes: Framing the design; creating the walls we play ball against; and the taming of the wild animal. We see this process of taming as an important distinction between design and an artist’s freer potential for personal expression.

semantics

The shoe itself, like all other objects, has its own particular conditions, and it is these that the second part of the book is focusing on – the limitations to freedom the designer places with his or her conscious choices in relation to the intention of the design. And the variable parameters in the field of potential the designer can work with in the development from a more or less precise starting point to the finished shoe.

function

What we want and what we are able to do is dependent on the character of the object we are working with. We have different intentions with the design of a sports car and the design of a moped. And we are able to do different things when we design a sports shoe than when we design a high fashion dress. The project’s direction and the degree of freedom it allows is fundamentally different for the different design specialities and even though the basic design processes across the board are similar, the intentions and parameters we work with are specific for each object type.

visual

expression context

composition form

surface

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functio semanti feeling

ion tics

intention

the designer’s space of intentions The following three sections deal with the shoe designer’s intentions. What do we want to do with the design? What demands do we have? We will attempt to illuminate the designer’s intention through three core terms that together frame the understanding of the limits to the design process. Terms that mirror the fundamental considerations of what shoes mean in a person’s life seen in the light of what we learned in the first section: Function: What does the shoe need to do? The designer’s considerations in terms of the practical use, comfort and the bodily sensations associated with the shoe’s physiognomic appearance.

Semantics: What does the shoe say? The shoe as a media for the designer’s storytelling.

The way the designer works with the user’s dreams, fantasies, personal narratives and ideal perception of the world around us.

Feeling: How does the shoe move us? The designer’s aesthetic work with our non-verbal preferences and sense of what good design is. The music in the shoe that can be sensed by both the designer and the user as a sense of direction, developmental space and aesthetic framing.

These three terms create the space in which the design process takes place. The intentional space gives the designer a clear, precise frame to act in relation to and a tight, but not too tight, sense of the design project’s overall direction.

In a practical situation, this framing is often driven by somebody else than the designers themselves: A boss, a marketing department, a customer. These limitations will often have an open, loosely formulated form, which gives the designer the opportunity to formulate a more precise and detailed framing of the task.

The three sections of the designer’s intentions is followed by four sections about the visual means of expression available to the shoe designer. It is in relation to these means that the design becomes visible – with body and substance. But without a clear intention for the project, the visual work will float freely without any impetus or direction. Therefore, building and framing the intention of the designer is as important an aspect for the work as its physical manifestation.

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function / the foot function

the imperfect foot Like so many other human inventions the shoe comes about as an expression of dissatisfaction with the way things are.

At its most basic, we wear shoes because the bare foot doesn’t fulfill all our functional needs.

It is too soft and vulnerable to walk on sharp stones and it doesn’t cushion us sufficiently when we have to run long distances on asphalt. It isn’t able to grip in snow and gravel and has too much friction against the dance floor when we want to dance the Waltz. It gets too cold on the ice in the winter and too hot on the desert sand.

The snake slithers on its belly, the snail glides on its own trail. Insects crawl on six diminutive legs, the elephant forges its path with its four massive, flat feet. Our fellow creatures use the feet given to them by nature and use them as well as they can. But the hand of evolution has given us humans an over-dimensioned brain that allows us to observe ourselves from the outside and dream of being different from what we actually are.

Instead of simply accepting the fact that our feet hurt when stones cut into them, we have found ways of wrapping them in leather to protect the soles. And rather than simply accepting the leather-bound feet, we have imagined shoes with advanced methods of closure, padded inner soles and a plethora of other functions that makes it more comfortable being a foot.

But the creative dissatisfaction didn’t stop at the shoe’s function – our desire to transform the visual expression of the human body also extended itself to the feet, and we have developed a complex visual culture whose only goal is to decorate the foot: Shoe design.

The human foot is an advanced machine and sensitive precision instrument that makes it possible for us to walk upright and move easily in various kinds of controlled fall - walking, jogging, hopping and running - over lava landscapes and slippery café floors. The foot’s 26 bones, 33 joints and over one hundred muscles work together in a complex cooperation - and that is what a good shoe relates to and supports.

Regardless whether the shoe designer relates to the foot’s ergonomy or simply sees the foot as the scene on which the art of shoe design can unfold, it is the imperfect but profoundly capable foot that is the beginning and end for all shoe design.

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function

Signe Klok and Martin Bo Christiansen: Prototype for slip-on shoe mechanism.

the shoe’s grip on the foot Put a shoe on. Feel how the foot slips into place and how the shoe gently holds it. Not too tightly. Just right. Like a well-balanced hand shake that has strength of character without being too dominating.

Putting shoes on is something that we teach children and repeat time and time again all through our lives. Shoes on. Shoes off. Again and again.

There are shoes that are formed to be put on as quickly as possible – sandals, slippers and clogs without heels. And there are knee-high laced boots that take an age to get on. There are flip-flops and knob sandals that demand a serious effort on the part of the user to keep them on.

There are hiking boots that stick like a rock and seem moulded to the shape of the foot. Shoes that relate to the foot in various ways and to various degrees – from a fleeting kiss to the solidity of a long-term marriage.

Feet have different shapes and forms and the shoe has to be able to fit the anatomy of the individual user. Children have chubby, flat feet, sports people have strong, athletic ones. Some users have high insteps and others have toes that are formed by a life long use of pointed shoes.

The individual shoe size has to be able to fit a wide range of actual foot types, and for this reason shoes are often equipped with various closure mechanisms that make it possible for the user to distribute the pressure evenly over the foot: Laces, velcro, straps etc. Others use fixed closing mechanisms such as zippers or elastic materials to provide the same flexibility. Closing mechanisms can be discreet and formed largely by their function or the designer can have made an active choice to draw attention to them.

The most intense physical experience of the shoe comes from the inner sole. This part of the shoe is fundamental to the question of comfort and can be seen as the user’s own wearable landscape. It can give the user the experience of walking on soft moss or on a hard, solid surface dependent on the quality of the physical sensation the designer intends to convey.

The insole is also an important ergonomic element of the shoe. This is where the forces from the body’s own weight are distributed over the sole of the foot. How much weight must the arch bear? How do the toes relate to the ground? How does the heel land after a step?

In open shoes like sandals, the insole is a significant part of the visual expression of the whole shoe. The designer can either use a distinctly formed insole as part of an ergonomically shaped, sculptural element in the design – like Birkenstock – or downplay the ergonomics to give the insole a cleaner expression like in a classic high heeled women’s sandal or slingback.

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Mira Vinzent, Matilde Nyeland and Marie Munk Hartwig: Sole experiment

function

the sole and the ground we walk on There is mud, slippery stones, ice, sand, the forest floor, soft peat, grass. And there are wooden floors, concrete floors, carpets, tarmac, stone tiles, rubber, thumbtacks, pieces of broken glass, linoleum, metal grates. Natural and man-made surfaces. Some hostile, some welcoming.

Surfaces we like to feel below our feet and surfaces we have no desire to feel.

The shoe is a foot on steroids. Its outsole is tough, solid and protects the foot well from below.

Outsoles for use in rough terrain have deep, caterpillar track-like patterns that bite into the surface and lets us traverse an otherwise impenetrable landscape. Outsoles for tango glide effortlessly over the dancefloor and let the dancer pirouette in seamless flows. Outsoles for daily use can do a bit of everything.

We have developed extreme soles for extreme use and extreme situations. Shoes with studs for sports people who are looking for maximum friction. Snowshoes with over-dimensioned footprints that prevent us from sinking into the snow. Even skates, rollerskates and ski could possibly be thought of as extreme forms of outsoles whose primary function is to minimize friction and maximize movement.

An extreme form of sole that has become so ubiquitous that we don’t see it that way any more is the high heel on women’s shoes. The fragile-looking, thin heel that lifts the back of the foot and with it the entire body into a rank, soaring posture which throughout Western culture has become synonomous with feminine eroticism or power. Or both at the same time.

In spite of its complete lack of a functional reason for existence, the high heel has become a ubiquitous element in shoe design. Better than any other elements of the shoe, it illustrates our willingness to sacrifice functionality for aesthetic or self-promotional reasons.

The story of the shoe starts from the ground we walk on. We cannot fly – we are forced to tread our path on the ground beneath our feet all through our lives. We are carried by the surface of the Earth, and the sole of a shoe is the intermediate layer between the foot and the ground that gives shoes their basic functional meaning.

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function

shoes for all purposes The functional demands for the shoe quite literally arise in the space between the foot and the ground. But this space has a third wall given by the specific functional context the shoe has to exist in. For which activities will it be used? Under which climatic conditions? And on which type of surface?

The functional context is so important for our experience of any given shoe that they are often sold in shops specifically catering to that type of shoe: Sports shoes, hiking boots, riding boots and safety shoes. We mentally organize them according to their primary function and think of a rubber boot as something radically different from slippers for example. We do this based on many factors, but most of all because of the type of activities we use the rubber boot for, the climate it is made for and the surfaces it is worn on, makes it essentially different from a house slipper.

In the course of a day, we choose shoes according to the context we need to use it in: Slippers for breakfast, dress shoes for working in the office, running shoes for after-work jogging, party shoes for a night out on the town. And in the course of a lifetime, shoes must meet the performance standards for a wide range of social and leisure activities and use environments - from the baby’s soft shoes to a multitude of different types of shoes, each of which corresponds to one of the many use scenarios of a human life .

As opposed to free art, design operates within more or less well defined functional limitations, and shoe design is no exception. Functional requirements for a specific use context, rather than being a hindrance to the shoe designer, act as a catalyst which sends the shoe design in a specific direction - and as such these limitations are crucial for the innovation process.

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work partysports activity

hiking

autumn

windy freezing

home

concrete

carpet

grass

wood

linoleum

gravel

sand

mud

tarmac

stone

surface

hot rain summer

subtropical

arctic

dry spring

climate

play

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semantics

the person who wears the shoe The shoe is full of signs that refer directly to the person wearing it. Shoe design is a language with its own well-established grammar, and we are highly qualified readers of the meanings that the shoe designer more or less deliberately has drawn into the shoe. In a split second, we can decode information about the user’s gender, age, economic status and cultural identity. We chuckle about or are repelled by spelling mistakes and grammatical blunders, and we recognize that the shoe’s linguistic statements can be interpreted differently by different users, so a sign that for one refers to the coolness and high status, can for another be an expression of bad taste and low status.

The shoe designer operates with precision and nerve in the language of shoe design in the same way as an author does with the text. The designer masters subtle differences between one sign and the other; builds sentences, paragraphs, chapters, entire stories of the person who will wear the shoe. A buckle or a stitching is like a word, a single shoe style is like a paragraph, and a shoe collection like a fully written novel that illuminates a wide range of meanings in the user’s life - or in their dreams.

We do not only create design for the world as it is - we design the dream about the world that we wish for and about the person we each want to be in our own imagination. This applies to clothing, cars, consumer products, and also for shoes. The shoe collector is a serial dream shopper, and the designer is the one who must deliver a steady stream of new dreams to satisfy our insatiable need to renew ourselves through our physical appearance.

We enter the scene where we play the part of our life, in the shoes that match the action in the script. Teenagers put on adult shoes and enter the world of grown-ups. The bride enters marriage in her bridal shoes. The man in midlife crisis runs frantically back to his youth in the sneakers that were hot when he was seventeen.

Each of us need shoes for a lifetime. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, over and over again. The shoe should be able to tell us clearly and convincingly what they can do for us at the particular time in our lives when we need it. Otherwise, we will not buy it. Or we buy it, but don’t use it.

Successful products tell stories about our lives that make us listen carefully; stories that seduce us and fill us with the desire and willingness to buy them. The kind of stories the shoe designer is able to tell with the shoe’s design language.

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skater

rockabilly

rave

raggare punk

nudism

mod

new age

cosplay

goth

biker

boheme swinger

gay

emo

fetish

hipster glam

surf

polyamory

teenybopper

trekkie

hip hop

hacker

roleplay

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reggae

heavy metal

skinhead

hiking

grunge hippie

rocker

semantics

mainstream and subculture shoes If you say punk, you have also said military boots. If you say hip hop, there is no way around sneakers. If we look at a marina, it will be teeming with people in boat shoes. If we imagine an archetypal career woman, what pops into the mind is a pair of pumps underneath a classic business suit. And if we have to portray an ordinary average citizen, a pair of comfortable brown leather shoes are essential in the overall picture.

Subcultures have their uniforms and shoes are an important part of it. The uniform is a passport to the community, and a sign to the other members of association and common values, regardless of whether the user sees themselves as a part of the main culture or in opposition to it.

The main culture – as much as it makes sense to talk about such a thing in today’s multifaceted culture image - is subdivided into sub-main cultures, each with their own particular preferences. From a commercial point of view, the large main culture is a very attractive market with the potential of distributing large production volumes – and the shoe industry puts a lot of work into understanding the areas of the main culture as market segments, each with their specific cultural codes that the shoe designer must understand and master in order to make an impact on each segment.

The shoe designer must always work their way into a particular culture, whether it is a narrow, well-defined subculture such as punk or a larger, more blurred segment such as western boy’s youth culture. In all cases, the designer needs to take the subculture’s semantic and aesthetic self-understanding as a basis for their work. In order to hit the mark with the design and provide the market with the new stuff it didn’t realize that it needed, the designer must surrender to and soak up the subculture’s spirit and language. The designer must not only make use of the cultural codes that are understood and accepted in the subculture, but immerse themselves into it in order to hear the music in what is uttered, so that the shoe’s semantics and aesthetics interact well within the cultural framework of understanding that it is designed for.

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semantics “Bake it in the oven”, said Anne Ditlev, Katrine Terese and Marie Blicher, students from Kolding School of Design, and used dough as the sketching material for their shoe project.

The result was the shoe “Dough”, whose design clearly tells the story of the dough’s semi-liquid,

the story behind the shoe Shoe designer Christian Louboutin’s high-heeled women’s shoes always have red soles.

Louboutin’s red soles are an example of a significant feature of the design that refers to one or more underlying stories. The soles can be seen as an obvious reference to the designer’s perception of ‘the inside curve of the arch being the most sensuous part of a woman’s foot’.

In this case, the red sole becomes a design language character that mimes the sole of the foot in a stylised manner and refers to the designer’s well articulated soundbite about the inside curve of the arch - a short and clear-cut soundbite readymade for the fashion press.

The red sole also points back in history to Louis XIV’s court where red heels were a status symbol reserved for royalty and nobility by law. The delicate, brightly colored heels demonstrated in the same way as soles of Louboutin that the social elite do not walk on rough or dirty surfaces. On top of this significance, the red color also reflected the power of the king and the blood that would flow if someone defied the monarchy.

With a single stroke, Louboutin has connected his shoes to these two stories, thus explaining the rational raison d’être of the red soles, giving the fashion press something to write about, and creating a viral anecdote that can spread through social media and create interesting dinner conversations. .

Stories like those about the red soles can either be a way of rationalizing after the event, a sales pitch that verbalizes an originally aesthetic expression – or be the underlying driving force in a design process where the shoe designer’s aesthetic choices are constantly made with the story in mind. Because the stories belong to the logical domain, they can be practical to hold onto as the steadfast anchor in an otherwise fluttering and elusive design process where intuition rises above the control of free will. Where it can be difficult to maintain a fleeting feeling - an aesthetic intention - as a guideline for design development, the story is always sharp and can be reproduced over and over again. Therefore, it may be useful for a shoe designer to create a strong history as a stable semantic intention that acts as a generator and normative benchmark for the aesthetic work.

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In the TV series Sex and The City, the shoe as a brand-oriented consumer product is an important prop. Shoe brands such as Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo serve as focal points for the explicit shopaholicism in the series, and the brand - the story of the shoe - is made synonymous with the shoe itself through hard-edged one-liners like “I lost my Choo”.

Masai Barefoot Technology (MBT) shoes have rounded soles that give the foot an unstable, rolling motion. The sole design stems from studying the way the Masai people walk barefoot on soft, natural ground and attempts to simulate this way of walking.

MBT’s story addresses a universal human desire for something

The advertising industry needs fast, easy to understand stories to sell shoes, and the shoe industry supports this need with clean-cut design concepts. Nike Free, with its flexible, slotted soles is a typical example of a strongly communicating design concept which easily translates to a great advertising story: Nike Free

ECCO Joke and Jacoform are shoes whose design reflects the story of a form adapted to the foot’s own shape and therefore providing optimal ergonomics. The story is two pronged: The shoes are developed with the intention of letting the design follow the foot’s shape, and the foot’s shape is also clearly readable in the final design.

Sports shoe designer D’Wayne Edwards has designed a range of shoes that are a direct response to the personal requirements of well-known sports stars such as the basketball player Michael Jordan. Air Jordan shoes allow the user to step directly into the star’s own shoes and For several generations the classic Englishman’s shoe has lived a stable life on the shelves of shoe stores because of a tradition-based narrative that eludes branding and fashion changes. The shoe is a wellestablished symbol that enters the user into a noble, masculine culture of tailored suits and Chesterfield armchairs.

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semantics

style – the alphabet of aesthetics Style and aesthetics are seen in everyday language as closely related concepts - or even as two expressions of the same underlying concept.

In the fashion industry, one uses the concept of style on the design of the individual garments in a collection. For many industrial designers, though, styling is a dirty word that refers to superficial, commercially driven design solutions - an approach to design work based on the unreflected use of design clichés.

But in fact, style is all about clichés in the original meaning of the word: a solid, well established design that can be repeated and easily recognized because of its rigid and non-dynamic nature.

Or to put it another way: Styles are letters in the shoe designer’s alphabet. By using a style reference, the designer connects himself to a known world of permanent historical and cultural connotations.

Style is frozen aesthetics - a semantic concept based on an original aesthetic reading of the work, which itself has been emptied of the immediate experience and over time reduced to a character, an established reference to the time and circumstances in which the work was new and could be seen with fresh eyes.

As opposed to the designer’s aesthetic means, which can be felt but not necessarily understood by the intellect, style is a concept which we can recognize and translate into a linguistic concept. We recognize the broad features or details of a particular shoe and call them by names such as Charleston, Hippie, Skater, a commercial brand name or the name of a specific trendsetting designer, decoding them linguistically as symbols without necessarily feeling what the design does for us.

The fact that stylistic features communicate relatively accurately to those who know them, allows shoe designers not only to draw on style as consistent, unambiguous references to certain historical and cultural models, yet also to let style concepts with different origins and expressions collide in quietly quivering or wildly explosive style clashes producing new, surprising harmonies from the original style clichés.

Style is for the shoe designer what standard progressions and harmonies are for the musician: A meaningful, solid foundation for experimenting design work, and an important component in the language available for the designer’s nonverbal communication with the consumer.

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Collages of various ECCO styles

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semantics

but what kind of shoe is it really?

One of man’s basic tools to understand the world is categorization. From our evolutionary ancestors’ simple categorization of the world - Is it something I can eat? Is it something that will eat me? - we have developed the categorization tool into a hypersensitive cognitive machine with thousands and thousands of categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-sub-categories and interacting relations between all layers of categorization.

When we see a shoe, we note first that what we see is a shoe and not a glove, a dog or a toaster. Then we put the shoe in the proper category: Rubber boot, sandal, pump, moccasin, Mary-Jane, slingback, sneaker, boat shoe or Oxford. The shoe aficionado continues this categorization several layers down, cross-referencing it to cultural and human connotations and other pertinent categorical information. And as the first part of this book demonstrates, employing this clustering method we categorize our shoe assemblies by a wide range of other parameters built on our physical sensations, aesthetic preferences, age, or simply function.

The category is the headline, the most important word when we need to understand and describe a shoe. Therefore, the shoe designer has to deal with the semantic content of the design and be very aware of how the shoe will be categorized by the consumer. If you want to draw a shoe with street credibility to young urban hipsters, using semantic features referring to a shoe category usually preferred by conservative generations will not work - unless it is precisely the break with the usual categorization - the infringement of the established semantic rules - that makes the design cool and avant-garde.

In addition to our need to put a name on the shoe type – What is it called? – there are also category axes which place the shoe in the functional, human and cultural landscapes of our consciousness: What can it be used for? Who is it made for? What culture does it belong to? ...and much more when one begins to look deeper. But whether we dig deep into the layers of understanding or just skate on the surface, categorizing things and giving them a name is a fundamental human thought process.

The shoe designer can simply accept this way of understanding the shoe by category as an indisputable basic condition – or choose to challenge it and make it an asset in the design work, so the semantic spaces of the different categories either become the walls the designer uses as self-imposed limitations or breaks down during concept development .

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sandal

mule

t-bar shoe

boat shoe

pump desert boot

court shoe

ankle boot

d’orsay

slingback

brogue

sneaker mary jane

peep-toe

wellington

monk

jodhpur boot

clog

ballerina

chelsea boot

moccasin

platform

derby

cowboy boot

oxford

loafer

slip-on

saddle shoe

feeling

the vibe of the shoe The designer’s functional intention is to make shoes that are useful. The semantic intention is to use design language to communicate with the intellect. And the aesthetic intention is to draw oneself into the heart, the body, the intuitive domain that we cannot think ourselves into, but only feel as an emotional, bodily perception of the design. In other words: The shoe’s feeling.

Because the design’s feeling , to a degree, eludes intellectual understanding, it is also difficult to talk about. Our aesthetic experience is tacit knowledge, which manifests itself to us as feelings of comfort or discomfort, only then to be translated into verbal likes / dislikes and still later to the rationalized explanations as to why this or that aesthetic experience pleases us or not. The basic ground for both aesthetic experience and aesthetic development is deeply nonverbal, strictly intuitive in its core, and we therefore do well to let intuition rule when we as designers create and evaluate our own work.

The closest we come to a controlled way of talking about feeling, is by referring to other aesthetic experiences where we presume that our interlocutor may have had an intuitive sense of things similar to our own. But we can only presume, never actually know. How does my neighbor see the color red? Or: Is a specific shade of red appealing or ugly? There is no absolute answer. The best we can do is use examples where we can feel whether there is common ground, so a conversation on the subject makes sense.

In the shoe designer’s case, other shoes offer the most obvious example of the different kinds of feeling that can be used as inspiration for design work and dialogue with other people. But as a basis for aesthetic development and understanding, a fixed object like the shoe can be too specific and tie down the intuition with all its mundane, insistent presence. Similarly, an in-depth user study such as in the book’s first half accommodates so many layers of information that it becomes difficult for the designer to actively use this complex knowledge for ideation.

Therefore, designers often use a more ethereal, open aesthetic frame of reference as a guideline and development area in their work. The moodboard is a classic design tool with evocative images, materials and non-binding text which strikes a feeling without placing the various aesthetic elements in a finished design solution.

Goethe called architecture frozen music. Music, along with dance, is probably the art form which most clearly bypasses the intellect and affects the heart and body directly. And because music is often a collective art form, its creators, practitioners and users through the ages have had to develop a refined vocabulary of aesthetic terminology so that they can discuss and collaborate on the live process which music always is. This vocabulary lends itself diligently to other free and bound art forms, and shoe design can also in many contexts be described in musical terms: What is the shoe’s vibe? What is its tone? Is it like a wide ambient soundwave, low-key minimal chamber music or hard pumping death metal? Does the shoe make us walk, run or dance? Is it harmonic or dissonant? Is it a noisy or quiet design?

In corporate branding efforts, the concept of feeling is a crucial factor. What is often referred to as a brand’s DNA could also be described as the brand’s feeling – the underlying tone of the basic designs which make up the product portfolio or seasonal collection. The factor that enables us to recognize a Chie Mihara shoe, an ECCO shoe, or a Blahnik shoe alone by the music of the design. It is the designer’s aesthetic fingerprint, the quality that allows us to spot a Porsche from a kilometer away, and to recognize Mozart’s sound as that of Mozart. The shoe designer’s ear for the tone of the design – the difference between playing in or out of tune.

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feeling

being there From time to time, we hear ourselves mention a design as contrived and incoherent. And other times as heartfelt and authentic. In both cases, this is a question of aesthetic judgment. We reflect upon the basis of a gut feeling that there are some things which are genuine, consistent and true, while others are phony, untrue and out of sync with themselves.

But how can a design be true or untrue? Genuine or phony? Consistent or inconsistent? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic lie?

The book’s first half demonstrates that as shoe users, we each carry around a set of irrational ideas about aesthetics and comfort based on very personal aesthetic ideals - that is, why we prefer some colors, shapes and sensations over others. For some people, a pop star in bangled pink platform shoes represents the pinnacle of fashion and presence. For others, well worn workboots on the feet of a hardworking farmer are the emblem of true and unquestionable authenticity. In such a spectrum of diametrically opposite taste preferences, it may seem meaningless to talk about the true and the false - and yet few people deny that they split their cultural experiences in a continuum of more or less deep and meaningful, more or less true, more or less authentic works. As Hans Christian Andersen’s little gray nightingale, who with its authentic, natural song won the emperor’s heart more than the artificial, jeweled mechanical nightingale. Much like the difference between a TV reality show, and a well-researched, well told documentary.

Over time, we develop a sharp view of what is good and bad quality - also when it comes to design. The experience of quality is closely linked to our sense of aesthetic solidity and authenticity - a sense of whether the design is firmly grounded in a consistent, true underlying sense, or whether it is speculative, contrived and plucked out of thin air.

It is very much up for debate what is authentic and inauthentic, and what is good and bad quality in design. No one can rightly claim to have a more valid perception of quality than others. But the quality issue is not more relative than that in the collective consciousness we act with a more or less explicit quality hierarchy, where we perceive kitsch and pop as ranking lower than timeless classics and artistic avant-garde.

The shoe designer can work with an intention to maximize the feeling of authenticity and produce a design that is deeply credible in its own terms and fully consistent with itself and the cultural heritage the design is built upon. Or the designer can turn the deep authenticity upside down and throw himself headlong into a light-footed game with the affected, ethereal, illusory, and try to conjure a high-quality design out of the blue sky.

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Hellene Jørgensen, Mathilde Maalouf and Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen: Nature shoe

Nina Guldager, Carina Sveistrup Mikkelsen and Niviaq Binzer: Illusion shoe Photos: Jens Christian Hansen

feeling

to experience the shoe with the eye A far more mundane aspect of the designer’s aesthetic intention is all about the particular experience of the shoe’s physical characteristics its visual expression is meant to convey. Do we perceive the shoe as light or heavy? Should it stand firmly on the ground or float as much as possible? Should it express comfort, or does this not matter? Should it give us a sense of speed and dynamism like a sport shoe or be static as a classic clog? Is it powerful and robust as a hiking boot or delicate and fine as a stiletto? Is it rigid or flexible? Soft or hard?

The moment we see a shoe, we form a theory about how it feels to touch it, wear it, walk or run in it. We feel the shoe with our eyes. If we see a shoe with a natural colored rubber-sole, we assume that it is heavier than a similar shoe with a white polyurethane sole because this is almost always the case. If we see a brown leather shoe with cushioned edges at the ankle, we assume that it is soft and comfortable inside. If we see stripes and bright colors on the shoe, we assume that it is good to run in.

The theories on the shoe’s physical characteristics we form on the basis of the visual impression are not limited to the feel of the shoe’s material. In a split second, we also develop a presumption of the bodily sense the shoe will give us and how it will feel to walk in. The visual experience of a pair of high heel shoes will in our consciousness transform itself into a perceived physical experience of the particular posture and gait high heels give.

The sight of a shoe with hard soles or heels will give us a supposed experience of the sound we make when we walk across a floor in the shoe. A large, sturdy boot gives us a sense of invulnerability and power.

The type of bodily experiences that users describe in the book’s first half - to ‘stand on a mountain’ as Camilla, or to ‘sneak up on’ as Thomas, on soft soles - are embedded bodily experiences in our consciousness that greatly play into our visual experience of the shoe.

The shoe designer’s choice of design expression and materials strongly influences how we visually experience the shoe’s physical properties, and a good coherence between what we see and what we experience when we put the shoe on is usually desirable. That is, unless the designer chooses to titillate the user by playing on our stiffened prior assumptions and give the shoe the opposite properties of that which the design traditionally expresses.

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visual expression the designer’s means of expression In the foregoing text, we have looked at how the designer can define their realm of possibilities and give themselves a directional impetus for the shoe design with a coherent set of functional, semantic and aesthetic intentions, some of which may take the form of outright demands from a client, while others are clean design choices.

The following four sections illustrate a basic selection of the shoe designer’s many tools through four core concepts that include their own set of variable design parameters: Form - How can designers work with the shoe body, its three-dimensional basic shape? What is the connection between the shoe’s expression and the last which forms the basis for the construction of the shoe, both in the design process and the subsequent production?

Context - How does the designer relate the shoe’s two areas of contact with the outside world – the foot and the ground - to his work? How to put the shoe’s grip on the foot into play as an active design parameter? How does the shoe meet the earth and use the space between the foot and ground in the design?

Composition - The most comprehensive section, which discusses a wide range of the variable parameters available to the shoe designer in the formulation of the shoe as a composition.

Which design possibilities are involved in working with the relationship between the shoe components, with the breaks and lines of the design, rhythmic repetitions, varying complexity and dynamics of symmetry axes, pseudo symmetry axes and various forms of ornamentation?

Surface - We only see shoes because of the light reflected from their surface. The surface is also the point where we feel its tactile properties. Therefore, the characteristics of the surface are essential for the shoe’s feel and visual essence - and this is the reason for this book’s graphic expression being so strongly influenced by the three textile designers’ work with the shoe’s surface material. This section will discuss the possibilities that the color spectrum offers, the shoe designer’s choices when working on the visual tactility of the surface, and the texture and pattern of the shoe’s upper and sole.

A selection of the parameters associated with each of these four core concepts are illustrated as knobs on a mixer, which the shoe designer can turn up and down during the design process.

This model of the designer’s means of expression shows the designer as a sort of machine operator of a given set of parameters for a variable, but in its essence basic archetype. The mixer model does not provide unlimited space for radical innovation. It challenges the idea of the design project as the blank piece of paper with unlimited degrees of freedom and the designer as the free artist with infinite possibilities of expression. The model rather borrows from music’s self-understanding, where a tightly structured tonal system, despite the severe limitations it imposes on the composer, offers such a staggering number of options that the system has functioned well as a space for artistic expression over several centuries.

Illustrating the designer’s possibilities of expression through these sets of parametric controls obviously should not be seen as an attempt to provide a definitive explanation of the essence of the design process, but as a key to a possible understanding of some of the conditions that shape the design of a shoe.

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the shoemaker’s foot: the last The shoe’s form comes from the last. The last’s shape comes from of the foot. But the last is not only a model of the foot in wood or plastic. Its shape represents a careful balance between ergonomics and the shoe designer’s desire to give the shoe an outer shape that is not necessarily dictated by the foot’s natural shape.

Designing the last is a highly specialized skill, and the shoe designer works closely together with a last-maker during the development process to ensure that the last not only supports the shoe’s exterior design, but that the final shoe becomes a piece of properly functioning ergonomical footwear.

Because the foot shape is a given, the last maker’s degree of freedom is limited. If the shoe must be comfortable to walk in, it needs to fit snugly, yet not too tightly on the foot. It should allow for some room in front of your toes, take into account arch support, retention of the heel, the ankle and foot’s rolling motion when walking, and the shoe’s cutoff towards the leg, along with a variety of other factors that play together for the shoe to be as good as possible to walk in.

However, the foot is of course far from a stiff form. It is a flexible, organic entity and the last’s design can be varied quite radically without the shoe being decidedly uncomfortable. In particular, the shoe designer may vary three parameters to support the design concept: The shape of the toe, height of the heel and the toe spring. The proportions of these areas in the last determines the designer’s ability to produce the desired design and ergonomics.

When the foot-shaped shoe, health sandals and minus heel shoes occurred in the seventies along with a strongly expressed desire to free the toes, it was partly due to the shoe designers’ over-exploitation of the foot’s flexibility in high-heeled, narrow, elegant but ergonomically problematic shoe styles where a disproportionate amount of body weight rested on a compressed forefoot. The feet of longtime users of such shoes can even change shape permanently as a result of the influence of the shoe so that the foot shape begins to resemble the shoe.

By balancing the aesthetic and ergonomic requirements of different usage situations, the designer decides to which extent the design of the last must be guided by the constraints of the foot’s ergonomic needs. Thus, it might make good sense to create an ergonomic tradeoff in the design of a party shoe to look as sexy and stylish as possible, whilst only being worn a few hours at a time - while the opposite is true for a hiking boot, where the user must walk long distances for many days in a row.

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the last: expressive parameters

Brian Frandsen: Classic men’s shoe based on a last with room for a sixth toe

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the expressive last If we shift the focus from the last’s importance to the foot to the expressive possibilities it offers the designer, history shows that shoe designers do not constrain themselves from generating lasts that differ greatly from the foot’s shape. The Middle Age’s Poulaines were shoes with very long and pointed toes, which in their more extreme forms were decidedly unfit to walk in.

The same can be said of today’s most high-heeled or heel-less shoe styles. In such shoes, the aesthetic considerations dominate the ergonomic ones and the user chooses the shoe as an expressive piece of clothing rather than a practical one.

Foot-shaped or shaped by aesthetic considerations – in any case the last is the base upon which the shoe designer builds his design. It expresses the shoe design in its bare basic form without sole, heel, cut lines, openings, stitching, colors, materials and all the other details that differentiate one shoe from another. Because the last’s basic shape is bereft of detail, the same last can form the basis for a large number of different styles, and the designer will reuse a last several times in a collection to create a solid link between the shoes in the collection.

With the last’s form, the designer first and foremost articulates the shoe’s toe and the heel’s lift off of the ground. The toe is the shoe’s face, like headlights are the eyes of a car. It may be blunt and soft or sharp and angular, low and flat or high and rounded. The toe’s form is an important factor in our experience of the shoe’s main character. A large, round toe can make the shoe nice and safe, powerful and masculine or childishly clumsy, depending on the shoe’s other design features. A pointy, geometric toe can steer our perception towards something aggressive, sexy, formal or rebellious.

The last’s heel height determines which options the designer has to work with on the foot slope and heel of the shoe as a means of expression. A last with no or low heel height creates a shoe with a solid grounding of the foot and limited focus on the heel, while a large heel height gives the foot a hovering, traditionally feminine character and turns the heel into an important element in the design. By putting a platform sole under the last, the designer can regulate the shoe’s total height regardless of heel height, and the same last can provide soles with different volume and height.

The shoe designer often works directly on the last in the sketch process. This can be done by draping leather, fabrics and other details on it to get an idea of the textural interplay between the shoe’s materials, by drawing the upper’s cut lines and colors on plastic shells that are vacuum formed over the upper part of the last - or by covering the last in a layer of masking tape which the designer draws on and cuts in. When the tape model is removed from the last, it gives a good impression of the shoe shape, and can also form the basis of a flat 2D model of shoe components which the designer uses to cut the individual elements out of the right materials for a more definitive model.

However, it is important to take into account that the thickness of the materials in the final shoe supplemented with sole thickness will make the final design appear somewhat more voluminous than the last’s raw form.

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context

the shoe that surrounds the foot We must be able to put the shoe on. It should feel safe and comfortable to have the foot in it. It must follow the foot when we walk. And we should be able to take it off again.

This may seem trivial and obvious, but if you have spent time putting on and taking off high lace up boots, walking long distances in shoes with a poor fit, or tried to hold on with your toes to a pair of flip-flops while rushing across a soft sandy beach, you know that these basic requirements for the interaction between feet and shoes are not so obvious after all.

The upper’s and insole’s embrace of the foot and the process of slipping in and out of the shoe’s embrace is an intimate physical interaction between the user and the shoe. The design of the interior of the shoe - and in particular the insole - is the designer’s invitation to the user.

Put me on, shouts the shoe, try me! The user’s desire or reluctance to respond to this invitation depends largely on the choices the designer has used in the design of the visible parts of the interior of the shoe.

Does the interior of the shoe appear as a soft, comfortable living room, where the foot can sink into total relaxation and homely comfort? Is it a domed sports arena where the foot’s ability to perform at its peak is optimized and supported by a design that takes ergonomics and performance very seriously? Or an elevated public stage, such as a high-heeled sandal, where the half-naked foot makes an entrance and performs the seven veils dance in an erotic game of interaction between the exposed and the hidden?

Because the eye will often seek the insole to get an impression of how the shoe feels to wear, it is an obvious spot to place graphical branding elements - product name, logo etc. And the designer can increase or decrease the weighting of its importance in the design with a more or less dramatic articulation of the insole’s shape and color. A loud insole combined with a quiet upper can turn the design inside out by moving the visual focus into the shoe.

The shoe designer also determines whether the interaction between foot and shoe is a loose, informal embrace, or whether there is a long-term, committed relationship which it takes an effort to enter into and escape from again. Is it a pair of slippers the user can slip the foot into and out of in an instant from a standing position, or must the user get down on hands and knees and fiddle with laces, velcro straps or buckles?

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the foot meets the shoe: parameters

ECCO: Joke

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116 show / hide

Kristina Mielec: Cowgirl boot

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context

the covered and the bare foot The shoe differs significantly from most other garments by having a solid form which does not depend on the body that carries it. It gives the shoe designer other constraints and opportunities than a fashion designer working with soft, malleable textiles which get their structure and form of interaction from the body. It’s possible that the shoe’s solid form is one explanation why many shoe designers come from other backgrounds than fashion design.

At the same time, there is obviously considerable overlap between the scope of the shoe designer’s and fashion designer’s work. An important common feature is the designers’ use of the interplay between covered and uncovered parts of the body as an artistic instrument - in the shoe designer’s case the interplay between the visible and invisible parts of the foot, ankle and leg.

The scale of covering runs from the over-arching knee-high boot to the flimsy sandal, which can even be done with transparent straps or laces, so the whole foot is visible and nothing is left to imagination. Between these extremes lies a myriad of variations, where the designer can adjust the balance between the shoe and foot’s dominance and choose to reveal the toes, instep, arch, heel, ankle with few or many cuts in the base, given by the last’s form.

The balance between the covered and the bare revolves around a center point, which at one end of the scale has the sandal which appears as a sole with added straps, while at the other end is the fully closed shoe with a single cut letting a few toes or heel exposed. Shoes that in theoretical terms follow a respectively additive and subtractive design strategy.

A successful open shoe design is often a well chosen visual balance between the shoe as the foreground and the foot as a backdrop. When the fields that the shoe lines divide the foot into not only remain the residual forms of shoe parts but in themselves appear as forms in their own right, the designer might obtain an equal visual dialogue between shoes and feet which pleases the eye and gives the design a strong internal consistency. It is said of the font Helvetica that its enduring success as the world’s default font for over half a century is precisely caused by the design’s fine balance between the letters and the spaces they form inside and around them.

The foot is perceived by some as an erotically charged body part, while for others it seems repulsive and anything but erotic. The shoe designer may choose to emphasize the erotic aspect by allowing its design to caress the foot and play a teasingt game of hide and seek with the eyes - or just treat the bare foot as a practical base for the clamping of a sport sandal with straps and velcro.

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context

the shoe meets the ground The shoe’s main functional element is also, paradoxically, the least visible: The sole we walk on and which protects the foot from the ground.

The sole can play different roles in shoe design: It can, as on a pair of Dr. Martens boots, be large and strikingly visible in the form of a wide border that frames the entire shoe and form a sort of podium, which the upper rests upon. Such a massive sole imparts a feeling of heaviness and of standing with your feet firmly on the ground, and in practice the sole’s large surface gives a solid footing on loose ground. The Buffalo shoe’s platform sole or 1970’s sandals wedge heel have a similar visual attention, but instead of giving the shoes a visual grounding, they lift the foot and play with the force of gravity.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are different shoe types such as ballerinas and pumps, where the sole disappears beneath the upper and plays a minor role in the design. For pumps and other high-heeled shoes, the sole is equipped with a significant heel, whose thickness and transitional geometry towards the sole determines if we read it as a separate item or as part of the sole. If the heel is a slender, attached stiletto, it is perceived less like a part of the sole than a broad, sturdy heel that blends into the sole’s geometry in a smooth transition.

Where the high-heeled shoe is like a tense bridge structure, the flat sole rests either flatly on the ground or meets it with a soft, positive curvature with the toes slightly lifted. Besides the change of the shoe’s ergonomics that this curvature gives, it also conveys an expression of dynamism and movement as if the shoe designer has prepared the foot to walk or run.

The lift of the toes can reveal a bit of the otherwise hidden outsole, but the designer can also choose to extend the outsole’s pattern in a soft radius around the sole’s edge, so that the pattern becomes an active part of the standing shoe’s visual expression. If the outsole is equipped with a deep pattern, its sharply cut off edge itself becomes a distinctive design element, even though it is not pulled up around the sole edge.

Especially in sports shoes, articulating the sides of the sole with powerful lines, graphics and color fields is a widely used design feature. Or in the case of shoes such as Nike Air using balloon-like transparent air pockets that tell a clear story of the sole’s shock resistant properties.

The visible part of the sole is an obvious place for the designer to work with the visual presentation of the shoe’s performance. The sole can be made to look soft and comfortable or tough and hard. Likewise, the user’s expectations of the sound the shoe delivers can be worked with in the sole’s design.

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The author’s faithful Dr. Martens boots meeting the ground

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context

winged by shoes “To be carried by shoes, winged by them, to wear dreams on one’s feet, is to begin to give reality to one’s dreams,” said Roger Vivier, the celebrated French shoe designer who is credited for the reinvention of the stiletto heel in the 1950’s after half a century of oblivion.

The high heel is the shoe designer’s rebellion against gravity, a feasible way to provide shoes with wings in the real world outside of our dreams. It lifts the body away from the gravity of the Earth and up into slightly higher altitudes, where it is a bit easier to be the one we dream of being; a higher, prouder, idealized version of ourselves. Even though it is only a few centimeters.

The thinnest of the high heels, the stiletto, is exclusively the woman’s domain. It is the element in shoe design that more than anything else distinguishes a woman’s shoe from a man’s; the ultimate symbol of the traditional concept of femininity and therefore historically a thorn in the side of those who want to see women break free of the stereotypical gender roles and the garments that support them. The stiletto heel is traditionally associated with sex, fetish, domination and power, and compared to its relatively small size in the overall garment picture it is disproportionately loaded with cultural significance.

A high-heeled shoe is characterized by a markedly different tension in its visual expression than the flat shoe with its earthbound heaviness. Where the flat shoe just rests idly on the ground, hiding it from the eye, the high-heeled shoe vaults in a tight arc over it - thereby forming a space under the shoe which forces the designer to relate entirely differently to the visual dialogue between the shoe’s underside and the ground. This negative space is not a physical part of the shoe’s body, yet a crucial element in the high-heeled shoe’s overall expression. The space invites the gaze to penetrate the shoe, look up under its skirt and as a voyeur spy on its otherwise hidden underside.

The design interplay between the heel as the foreground and space and earth as the background is similar to both the architect’s spatial work sphere and the font designer’s twodimensional one. The balance between the positive and negative spaces are important design parameters of these disciplines as well as for the shoe designer.

An equally important design parameter as the heel’s encounter with the ground is its attachment to the outsole and the connection between the heel and the shoe’s overall design. Does the heel appear as an attached element with its own independent character or does it glide with a smooth transition into the sole and submit to the overall lines of the shoe?

There are shoes whose entire soul sits in the heel, while the rest of the shoe’s design is played down to give the heel room to dominate the visual expression. And there are shoes where the high heel is simply a matter of course, while the design focus is somewhere else on the shoe.

This balance is yet another one of the parameters available to the shoe designer in search of the winged shoe.

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Photo: Jens Christian Hansen

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the shoe’s lift from the ground: parameters

Kaja Lønnkvist Stumpf, Tobias Tøstesen and Louise Ravnløkke : High heeled shoe

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composition

from basic shape to elements The shoe’s basic shape can quite generally be said to arise as a secondary result of the foot’s own form combined with the space created by the foot’s rise relative to the ground. The upper’s form roughly follows the foot’s, while the sole and heel fills the space between the foot and the ground. In this sense, the shoe’s overall geometry is more or less given once the heel height is first decided upon.

This relatively rigid frame around the shoe designer’s work might seem limiting and potentially inhibiting for the artistic development, but as history shows there is no shortage of design variations within the limited form variation space the shoe provides for the designer. In practice, the designer has infinite compositional freedom and a broad range of design elements and parameters that interact with each other, creating harmonies, rhythms and contrasts as instruments of an orchestra.

Depending on the shoe type, the basic form is constructed from of a variable number of physical sub-elements - outsole, heel, toe box, throat, vamp, quarterback, counter, collar, lining, insole, lacing, tongue - which the designer can choose to juxtapose as clearly separate parts, splice into one another, or have them flow together in a coherent sequence. We also speak of additive, subtractive and integrative design strategies.

In the additive approach, shoe components appear as completed units joined together in a relatively loose, informal composition whose parts retain their individual character and only interact on a limited scale. This accumulation of individual elements can be structured in an orderly or chaotic way and give the shoe everything from an architectural discipline to a childish cartoon-like feeling. One could also call it bricklayer’s or LEGO builder’s strategy.

Subtractive design follows the sculptor’s strategy. As Michelangelo’s famous half-finished sculptures in which human figures are hewn out of the stone, the shoe’s composition is cut out of the main form. The projection of cut lines on a base is a subtractive approach - particularly when the lines are used to cut openings and make holes in the shoe surface. Subtraction puts more emphasis on lines’ and bodies’ interaction with each other than addition and therefore creates a more obvious interaction between the shoe’s parts.

The integrative design strategy is aimed at letting the shoe’s separate parts slide together without transition, to form a continuous, all-encompassing skin – like clay in the potter’s hands or a sports car’s slick, aerodynamic bodywork. The integrative approach is often associated with soft, organic form, but might as well take advantage of tight geometric shapes combined with smooth transitions. A sphere can be said to be the ultimate integrative shape.

The three strategies are rarely seen used exclusively in their pure form, but in practice will often be mixed together in the design’s different scales or play against each other in significant clashes where, for example, a purely integrative form is mixed with subtractive means of expression to provide the design with edge and dynamics.

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strategy

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separate element / integrated

High heel shoe draft designed using an additive strategy with emphasis on the separation of the individual elements.

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composition

The use of cut lines that form openings and divides as projections on a base, is a design instrument used extensively by fashion designers , industrial designers, automobile designers and other designers who work with solid form. Because the underlying base form - in the shoe designer’s case, the last – is only manipulated with cuts on its base surface without forming a new geometry, a design may bear a large number of cut lines without breaking visually apart.

Lines may be drawn in a continuous course or broken into segments. They can be soft organic curves or drawn with a strict geometric ruler. The designer’s formulation of the individual line courses and the interaction between the different lines form a pattern of open and closed areas of the shoe which in a well-balanced design complement each other in a delicate balance.

Cut lines between the shoe and the bare foot are one of the most significant instruments in the shoe desgner’s toolbox. Here, the designer can play striptease with the foot or armor it with an all-covering second skin. The designer can make a single, clear cut in the upper or turn it into a tangle of interacting lines. The lines of the shoe can snake affectionately around the foot or contrast against the foot’s shape with a sharp, geometric design. The lines can be as long, wide rivers that wind through a landscape, or as a ruptured pattern of lines forming the culture landscape’s half chaotic, half orderly patchwork quilt of plots, fields and forests.

The section lines may have vastly different characteristics. They can act as a discrete manufacturing features for joining two pieces of the same material. They can be highlighted as distinctive stitching with thick threads of contrasting color. They can occur in the clash between the upper’s leather and the rubber of the sole; between two textile surfaces in different colours; between clearly articulated elements of an additive shoe design. They may be flat and level with the last or may as in ECCO’s Joke be voluminous, strongly articulated elements, which in themselves become a dominant element of the design.

The shoe designer typically works with cut lines on a tape model or on a plastic shell that is vacuum formed over the last. By sketching in pencil and pen on such a three-dimensional model, the designer quickly receives a realistic impression of the line courses on the final shoe.

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the lines in the shoe’s landscape

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rhythmic parameters

The rhythmic sound that a shoe produces as it walks is yet another aspect of the shoe’s expression that the shoe designer has to deal with. Should the sound be muted and selfeffacing, or should the volume level be raised, so that the user gets a clear audio experience of rhythm in his own beat? And in that case - how should the shoe sound? Should it have a percussive, hard sound like a stiletto on a wooden floor or a rounder sound?

One can talk about the shoe design as having an underlying feeling, a tone that sounds clean throughout once the design is finished and successful. In the same way, we can talk about the beat of the shoe, the underlying rhythm that drives the design and provides the pulse and nerve.

It can be a clear, explicit pop rhythm, as expressed in easy to read, regular stitching, laces, straps and the like - or a subtle jazzy background pulse that can rather be felt as a basic groove in design than seen in specific rhythmic design elements.

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As in music, the gaps, the intervals between the rhythmic elements play a crucial role in our experience of the dynamics of the rhythm. In the spaces and the rhythmic phrasing of them, the designer can build a sense of expectation that is released and rebuilt again and again in a series of visual micro-experiences, which attracts and satisfies the eye.

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Just as we do not necessarily actively hear the pinching rhythm of the hi-hat in the music’s high notes, but simply record it unconsciously as the stable grid that holds onto the other instruments’ free phrasing of the basic rhythm, we don’t always experience the shoe designer’s use of rhythmic means of expression, but take for granted the appearance of rhythmic elements of both the large and the small scale of the shoe - from the quite rowdy rhythm in the course of heel-sole-upper unto the barely visible, but just noticeable rhythm of the fabric’s woven structure.

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As a design element, rhythm is akin to symmetry: Repetition - either as a reflection of a symmetrical axis or as a fixed rhythmic repetition of design elements - is a self-affirming motion where the next element’s raison d’être and location are confirmed by the one coming before it.

And vice versa.

Where the music and the body’s rhythm is linear and attached to time, the shoe spreads itself spatially over a three-dimensional surface as a repetition of lines, holes, seams, ribs, studs, columns, lines and textile patterns repeating themselves. We can read series of rhythms by letting one’s gaze slide across the rhythmic elements, and we can experience the parallel and the holistic as simultaneous subdivisions of a comprehensive, coherent whole.

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Our lives are steeped in rhythm. The heartbeat, the breath, the days and the changing seasons, the tides, the clock ticking, the music’s pulse. And not least, the controlled rhythmic motion we call walking and running. Again and again, we raise the foot, moving it forward, landing on the ground, pushing off. And again with the other foot. And again. And again. The shoe is a rhythm instrument that click clatters, stomps, jumps and shuffles us through our lives to the permanent accompaniment of the sound of our own rhythmic steps.

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the rhythmic repetition

Patterns of laces creating different rhythms

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Marloes ten Bhรถmer: Beigefoldedshoe.

Simplicity and complexity united in one design.

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composition

simple or complex A figure of speech in the design industry says that a good design should be so simple that it can be urinated in the snow. Or to put it in a more socially acceptable manner: less is more.

Classic modernism in design, whose canonized works today fill design museums and lifestyle store shelves, is largely a result of this strict minimalist credo.

Minimalism’s opposition cultivates the complex, messy, a clash of styles, punk, Baroque, the opulent, cultural pluralism, that which is too much and likes it that way. Less is a bore, says the mantra here.

In this spectrum between shaved sobriety and drunken recklessness, between too little and too much, between the Puritan and the hedonistic, between the square Bauhaus cube and the Gothic cathedral, the shoe designer varies their design’s degree of complexity by twisting a number of concrete parameters: Does the shoe’s form spring forth from one consistent principle, or is it nurtured by many different sources? Does it consist of a few or many sub-items? Is it an ascetic, pure shape, or is it complex patterns, material contrasts and ornamentation? Does the design operate with easy to understand symbols and references, or does it have a more inaccessible, abstract expression? Is it the character of a well-known conservative or provocative avant-garde conceptual framework? Does it tell the one clear main story, or the many communicative layers? Does the designer want to give the user a nice and easy experience or add as much mystery as possible to the design?

You could also talk about three axes of complexity: A numeric, a geometric and a cultural. A single cello has a lower numerical degree of complexity than a symphony orchestra, but if the cello plays Bach’s Suite for solo cello and an orchestra accompanies one pop song, the cello has a higher cultural complexity. A haiku poem is numerically simpler than the text of pop songs, but typically more culturally complex. A Nike sports shoes is much more geometrically and numerically complex than Marloes ten Bhömers minimalist sculptural avantgarde shoe but less culturally complex.

The simple has an evil cousin in the banal and uninspiring. And the complex is likely to slide into the complicated and inconsistent. Whether the shoe designer follows a minimalistic narrow path or engages in excesses of complexity, the task is the same: To give the design wings so that it rises above the trivial swamp - and a strong internal consistency, so it despite all possible external complexity is in good accordance with its own terms and rests solidly in itself.

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The similarities and contrasts give each other character and illustrate, confirm and expose each other. They are the shoe designer’s dynamic effects which determine whether the shoe is homogeneous or contrasting, quiet or loud, whether the shoe has momentum and excitement or calmness and contentment.

The distances between the extreme poles of the design tools represent the design’s dynamic space. A plain leather shoe with a homogeneous form language has a small dynamic space. A shoe design with strongly contrasting colors and materials put together by opposing principles of form has a large dynamic space. It is the same dynamic difference that exists within the color scheme, where the designer can choose to work with tone-on-tone principles with a limited dynamic or complementary colors with a violent dynamic – hence the following different design expressions.

Working with dynamic space in the design can be the tool that makes an otherwise unresolved shoe design work. A somewhat flat, dead design can come to life with a contrasting detail that gives the viewer a new key to unlock the design experience. A messy, incoherent design which moves in all directions gets a new direction and consistency with a unifying element that puts the emphasis on the design of the element’s chromatic, materialistic or geometric commonalities rather than the differences between them.

A design with a low dynamic relaxes the eye - but it is not necessarily the same as calming the mind. Monochrome paintings, tight cubic Donald Judd boxes, music made by one or a few long drone tones can, despite their very limited dynamic space, be more provocative and disturbing than gaudy pop art, dramatic equestrian statues and ultra dynamic dance and techno music.

A sport shoe where the volume is turned up on all the dynamic volume dials can catch the eye less than a forceful minimalist fashion design.

Everything exists because of and is nourished by its opposite. This is true on a deep existential level, but just as true in the practical details of the work in designing a shoe.

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A white stripe on a white shoe is something other than the same white stripe on a black shoe. A glossy buckle on a polished shoe is something other than the same buckle on a matte shoe. A sharp cut straight line on a soft organically shaped shoe is something other than the same line on a tight geometrically shaped shoe.

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symmetry parameters

symmetry and pseudo symmetry Man is symmetrical. Not in every detail, but, for an overriding consideration, we are a thoroughly symmetric design. There is a vertical axis of reflection which runs from the top of the head, down the spine and down somewhere in between the feet, resting in a symmetrical balance on the ground - wearing a symmetrical pair of shoes.

And we do not just look symmetrical. We think basically symmetrically. As designers, we fill the world with symmetrical objects and consider the use of asymmetry as a particularly sly sleight of hand that surprisingly breaks the symmetry apriori condition. The symmetry, in other words, is so deeply embedded in our design process that we rarely notice that we use it.

The extensive use of symmetry as a design influence is found not only in footwear design, but in industrial design, fashion design, car design, furniture design, architecture, engineering and many other design activities. Probably because of the convenient property of symmetry that it is self-affirming: The two halves of a symmetrical design are each other’s raison d’être, each other’s explanation. In the mirroring over its own central axis, the design has a centered tranquility, a stable calm in its own center. The same applies to an even greater extent in rotationally symmetrical design, where the center point is the root of the very form-generating axis of rotation.

A pair of shoes are generally symmetrical - with a few distinctive exceptions like Camper’s Twins, where the asymmetry is a key feature of the design. Each shoe is on the one hand nonsymmetrical in the strict geometrical sense, as it is formed around the asymmetric foot. But for many of the classic shoe types it makes sense to talk about a pseudo symmetry axis that runs in a slight curvature along the middle of the shoe. Across this axis are mirrored laces, the sole patterns, toe and heel shapes, stripes and swooshes and other ornaments. The asymmetric shoe thus becomes pseudo symmetric and the shoe designer can reap the benefits of symmetry’s self confirming stability.

The designer can of course choose to shape their shoes purely asymmetrically, and with a greater or lesser effort avoid the tendency to habitually think symmetrically. One obvious reason to work with asymmetry in shoe design can be that the exterior is seen more than its inside, and therefore it makes sense to put the emphasis in the design’s structural elements there while stitching and other technical production necessities are placed on the inner side of the shoe.

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Anna Nydam, Mads Hanghøj and Kirsten Nydam: Skeleton shoe concept.

Photo: Patricia Oczki

composition

the shoe as a media Ornament is crime, wrote the Austrian cultural critic and architect Adolf Loos in 1908, and with him and his contemporaries, the backlash of modernism towards decoration became, with its quest for pure form and an ingrained resistance to decoration, one of the century’s dominant aesthetic megatrends in Western culture.

However, it has not deterred shoe design from making use of appliqué ornaments on the shoes, and many of those which we see on store shelves are equipped with beautifying or communicating ornaments. How many and how significant depends on the style trend and market segment: Sport shoes and shoes for children, for example, are typically more ornamented than shoes for the high fashion market.

An ornament is a design element that is not included as an integral part of the shoe shape, but that is a complete, self-contained form without practical function: a leather flower, a metal bridle, a faux jewel, a rivet - or even more used: A company identity in the form of a logo or brand name as the three stripes of Adidas, the Nike Swoosh, Bikkembergs’ s name or Converse All Star’s characteristic circle.

The ornament can, like the bridle shoe, have a fitted physical object, it can be sewn on or a molded surface with printed motif, or it can be embedded in the body of the shoe material, as is the case with the widespread practice of casting the logo or company name in the sole.

The shoe insole with its half exposed, half-hidden location is a frequently used background for graphic decoration and branding, which has the unique property of being eye catching on shoe store shelves, yet hidden by the foot when the shoe is worn.

For the heavily ornamented shoe’s part, the shoe’s shape becomes part of the background in the design, so the shoe acts more as a medium for ornament, which thus becomes the primary means of visual expression. In this way, the designer works with a relatively neutral shoe form, which gets its primary design content from ornamentation - or from the materials’ texture, color and pattern.

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Christian Troels Hansen, Maria Rokkedahl Nørholm and Lea Zaar Østergaard: Neutral basis boot with replaceable ornamentation

Photo: Jens Christian Hansen

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surface

the color palette A shoe can not not have a color. The designer can choose not to make use of other effects such as rhythm, section lines, symmetrical elements, ornamental detail, design bearing heels, material contrasts, but it is impossible to not choose a color.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the color inevitability, it is an instrument which shoe designers typically use very carefully. An overwhelming proportion of the shoes that are produced for sale, are kept in black or various shades of brown, which is naturally perceived as leather’s default color. The brown shoe rests solidly in itself because of the authenticity, located in the very direct reference to the tanned, undyed leather’s own base color. Letting the shoe remain in leather’s own color is a kind of color-related nonselection, which the designer can use to mitigate the shoe’s expression or put the focus somewhere else in the design.

However, there are different types of shoes such as sport shoes, sneakers and ladies shoes for summer and parties where there is a long tradition of using strong colors, and the shoe designers do not hold back in using the entire color palette and allowing the contrasting and complementary colors to play with and against each other in a harmonious sound or in quivering discordant harmonies.

The color spectrum is a closed space of expression. But as it applies to design in general, it also applies to the confined space of color that it offers the designer an infinity of design choices, an infinite number of shades and a dizzying jumble of composition and expression possibilities.

A shoe’s color is often seen as a rather loose variable, something you can switch out or vary on top of a basic design. A given shoe style is generally available in a range of colors, which the buyer can freely choose from, and it is expected that the shoe designer has organized this choice for the buyer. Therefore, it is necessary that the designer not only controls the choice of colors for each shoe, but is able to generate a coherent collection of color schemes.

Such a collection of colors will inevitably be influenced by the time period in which it is created, and there are few characteristics of a shoe that so clearly point to a historical period as the color. Orange and brown in combination is an unambiguous reference to the seventies, like cobalt blue is to the eighties. Each historical period has its signature colors that function as a clearly readable semantic character, and the shoe designer can juggle time by allowing its colors to identify specific places in the shoe’s design history.

Similarly, colors are symbolic of emotion: The fiery, erotic red, the cool blue, green as nature; rebellious, sorrowful and aggressively sexual black. But colors do more than refer to the emotions - they sneak around the rational understanding and enter us musically directly into our hearts. Therefore, the shoe’s color scheme is one of the parameters of the overall shoe design in which the shoe designer can work most effectively with the shoe’s feel and its seductive properties.

ECCO color variations

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the visual tactility of the surface We understand the shoe’s material visually. All the different materials we have had contact with over the years serve as x-rays for the eyes: an experience based ability to see into the material and feel the physical and tactile characteristics with the eye. We rarely have any strong need to feel the shoe material with our hands, because we already have at first glance formed a fairly clear view of how it will feel. The material’s surface carries in itself its own tactile narrative.

The interplay of light in the shoe’s surface - from the dull matte to the mirrored, from the smooth to the highly textured – tells tales about the material behind the surface and conveys the emotions we associate with the given material: leather with earthy robustness, suede’s calm, laquer’s essential transience, a semi-translucent raw rubber sole that is at the same time a concrete and enigmatic natural material; shiny metal accesories that flash and accentuate the shoe’s form as the chrome parts of a car.

The shaped material’s three-dimensional characteristics tell another story which we read in the character of its folds; the reflection of light in different angles, the material’s progress over the shoe, the way it is pierced by seams and holes for the laces; the edges and joints which relate the thickness and often reveal more about the type of material than the surface itself. The worn material marks from long-term use, which tells about its movement and durability.

Based on these short-term visual observations, we draw conclusions about the material condition and its historical and cultural connotations. Is it leather, plastic, rubber, metal, textile?

How thick is it? How soft and flexible? How robust? What time period does it refer to? Who is the target audience? What tone does the designer achieve with this material?

Our ability to read the material gives the shoe designer a very direct access to work visually with our bodily sensation of the shoe. This pseudo perception, that one with a slightly paradoxical concept could call our visually tactile experience of the material, leaves an almost perceptible physical feeling of the shoe sliding under our skin through the eye. The composition of the shoe’s compound materials is therefore one of the designer’s most powerful sensual effects and a fundamental element in the creation of the shoe’s overall feeling and expression.

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Signe Eistorp Nielsen and Rosa Tolnov Clausen: Material samples from their work with the surfaces for this book.

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upper: texture and pattern Because of its practical and visual properties, leather is by far the most widely used material for the shoe upper. Tanned leather has an inherent surface texture which can range from the smooth, almost invisible to leather with a rough, rustic texture. The shoe designer chooses leather depending on how vibrant and organic the surface should be, the color and luster the surface must have, how soft or rigid the shoe’s upper needs to be and a variety of other parameters.

From the pure leather surface where the texture is given by the material itself, the designer can move towards a texture with a more human-induced touch. The leather may be perforated with a hole pattern, which in addition to the decorative effect can act as ventilation openings. It can be embossed with an artificial texture and be processed graphically using various techniques. And it can be cut into strips and woven into materials that contain both leather and textile expressions.

For the more casual shoe types, there is a long tradition of using special shoe specific textiles for the upper. These fabrics are either brought to life by virtue of the tissue’s own thread structure, or they may be provided with an additional expressive layer in the form of a printed pattern. Even the woven or knitted textiles’ starting point - the thin thread which forms the basis of the surface - invites the designer to vary the individual thread’s color and create patterns derived from the rhythm of the textile’s own structure. This straightforward correlation between the pattern and technical structure can be seen as a textile counterpart to the leather’s natural texture.

Where the leather texture is relatively arrhythmic and chaotic, the ornamental textile pattern often occurs in a repetitive rhythm. The scale of the pattern determines the degree to which we experience it as a genuine rhythmic pulse or more like a quivering motion in the texture. The pattern’s rhythm can stand alone or intermingle with the other rhythmic elements of shoe design.

In shoes like the Nike Flyknit, the shoe’s form appears directly from the textile so that texture, pattern and structure merge into one. In other shoes, the designer’s use of texture and patterns in the nature of two-dimensional ornamentation on the shoe’s basic form is either in the form of an accentuated detail or as a main theme for the shoe design.

The design content of the upper’s material composition is located at the intersection of the shoe designer’s and the textile designer’s work sphere, with the two disciplines contributing each with its own perspective to the essential part of the shoe design that we experience as visual and tactile through the material.

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The undersole’s surface connects more directly than most other shoe design elements to the shoe’s primary function: that we should be able to walk safely, stand firmly and confidently on the ground and be well protected against sharp objects. Therefore, the design of the sole is a somewhat more set assignment than the shoe’s other elements, and the designer must work within the framework of certain basic requirements, which in practice are almost mandatory: The sole should cover the entire foot surface; it should roughly follow the foot’s outline; it must have a sufficient thickness and material strength to protect the foot; it must be flexible and follow the foot’s movements; and it needs to have an appropriate friction response.

These fixed functional requirements limit the designer’s choice of materials, though the sole is typically made of different types of natural or synthetic rubber and, more rarely, of leather. The rubbers used for shoes have a built-in high friction response and are extremely malleable materials that gives the designer great form freedom.

A significant portion of the shoe designer’s work on the sole is to develop a pattern, which like the pattern on a car tire can displace water and give the user a firm footing on loose surfaces – as well as complementing the upper’s design expression. The designer may choose to follow the upper’s line and design themes in the sole or let its design stray completely from that of the upper, so it appears as a clearly independent element and thus gives the design a more additive character.

While the shoe’s upper is always visible, we only experience the sole’s design in flashes when walking or running when the sole faces a visible angle - and in stores where we stand with the shoe in hand and assess it. In either case, the experience has a very short window, and the designer can advantageously work to obtain a clarity in the sole and an easily readable expression that is targeted to the limited experience time.

Under the right circumstances, the shoe leaves a rhythmic series of inverted imprints of the sole pattern, and the designer may choose to exploit this phenomenon as a poetic side benefit, where the imprint is an active part of the design expression.

The sole pattern can mimic the sole of the foot through stylized silhouettes of toes, balls of the foot and heel, like a cat’s paw pads. It can run in subtle stripes like on a gekkos pad or like rake marks in a zen-garden’s sand. It can cut the sole into rough caterpillar-like blocks. It may be completely absent, allowing the user to slide around on a dance floor. It can follow the direction of movement or walk across it. It can be based on the foot’s contour and slide in from the sole’s edge. It may center around an embedded logo. It can be loud with dramatic lines and lively colors. It can be neutral in raw rubber or black with a motiveless motion of the surface. Yet another critical design choice which, together with all the shoe designer’s other choices, produce the finished shoe.

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Christina Friis Blach Petersen, Christian Nielsen and Signe Eistorp Nielsen: Outsole pattern

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authors & designers helle graabæk (1962) holds an MA in Textile Design from Kolding School of Design,

and an MA in Design Theory from the Royal Academy of Architecture. In 2000, she received a 3-year grant for her artistic work from The Danish Art Foundation. She has worked as a professional designer for several years, collaborating with companies like Kvadrat, Le Klint, etc.

In 2003, she started as a guest teacher at DSKD, and she currently holds the position as Head of Product Design. Beautiful shoes can for sure haunt her dreams, so she needs too “go get”!

else skjold (1969) earned her MA in Modern Culture and Communication at The

University of Copenhagen (2003). She worked as a freelance fashion writer for various Danish magazines before securing her position as a research assistant at Kolding School of Design, where she published the report titled Fashion Research at Design Schools (2008). She is currently a PhD Candidate at Kolding School of Design and Copenhagen Business School. The material from this project is part of her PhD thesis, to be titled The Daily Selection (2014).

michael frederiksen (1966), product and communication designer. Owner of multidisciplinary design consultancy Just Add Design. Michael is a co-founder and former partner of the Spin Doc Design & Engineering and eyeD design studios. Educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, he has worked with a great number of clients in very different business areas over the years. Apart from his commercial work, Michael is regularly used as a design teacher, lecturer and censor at Kolding School of Design, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Umeå Institute of Design. He also facilitates professional design method workshops for Design2Innovate.

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rosa tolnov clausen

(1985). Process, curiosity and renewal of weaving craftsmanship characterizes Rosa Tolnov Clausen’s approach to textile design. Rosa Tolnov Clausen holds a Masters in Design from Kolding School of Design specializing in woven fabrics. Through living and working in Italy, Germany and Finland, she has gained insight into textile traditions and techniques for how they can be renewed and interpreted through design.

She is currently working on a socio-economic weaving project with Works by the Blind. She has also been externally funded to travel to Japan to immerse herself in ancient weaving traditions.

signe eistorp nielsen (1988). A passion for shoes, especially sneakers,

characterizes Signe Eistorp Nielsen’s work with textiles. She is a graduate student at the Department of Product Design at Kolding School of Design. With a focus on surfaces, textures, patterns and unconventional material combinations, Signe Eistorp Nielsen’s work challenges our understanding of what shoes are. Her undergraduate project from the summer of 2013 was a textile collection for sneakers. The collection consisted of lasercut neoprene and TPU and surface treated leather. In her recently started postgraduate studies at Kolding School of Design, Signe Nielsen Eistorp is specializing in further developing shoe design through practical training, schooling and company collaborations.

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how we use them. how we design them.

An inspirational handbook for designers, design students and anyone else with an interest in shoe design.

The ambition of the book is to identify and describe a number of key concepts within two fundamental aspects of the life cycle of a shoe design: how the consumer uses and experiences their shoes and which parameters the shoe designer works with in the design process. In other words: how we use shoes and how we design them.