hate shoe
love shoe
Design, editing Michael Frederiksen, Just Add Design
+ The Love Shoe. Hate Shoe. project is part of the strategic collaboration between Design School Kolding and ECCO. This book was printed with support from ECCO.
Photography Michael Frederiksen and the student groups. Photos for the Shoe Matter / Shoe(s) Matter(s) article by Ulla Ræbild and Karen Marie Hasling
Proofreading Marianne Baggesen Hilger
Participants from ECCO Scott Lee Roberts, Jens Peter Bredvig, Alexander Villamor, Claus Ravn, Jan Boysen, Ella Madsen, Antonio Fernando Casimiro Soares, Birthe Winther, Charlotte Jakobsen, Dorte Nicolaisen, Hanne Zimmermann, Hans Willi Staack, Herle Thøstesen, Karen Jørgensen, Knud Jørgensen, Laila Schmidt, Lene Riggelsen, Majad Al-Shohani, Nancy Schmidt, Niels Davidsen, René Andersen, Roselyn Schildt, Terene Andersen,Ulrich Tessendorff, Jan Motzkus, Ib Overgaard, Ramona Munteanu, Fitri Nugraha, Helle Schmidt, Paula Oliveira, Junior Amaral, Ejnar Truelsen, Liam Maher, Adam Owen, Bjarne Zaedow, Andrzej Bikowski, Jakub Blimel, Ventislav Nikolov, Agata Zolich, Iben Thode Johansen, Susanne Carstensen and Tina Seirup Nielsen.
© 2019
Design School Kolding Departments of fashion, textile, accessory and industrial design Ågade 10 6000 Kolding +45 76301100 dk@designskolenkolding.dk www.designskolenkolding.dk
ISBN 978-87-93416-35-2 (printed version) ISBN 978-87-93416-36-9 (digital version)
hate shoe
love shoe
Keeping the Spirit of Danish Modern Alive
Prior to arriving at ECCO, I’d had the good fortune of over 30 years working across a fairly wide swath of the fashion industry. From heritage-inspired menswear to designer denim to heavily embellished womenswear and luxury kids wear. From Savile Row sartoria to seat-of-the-pants streetwear and from actionsports to avant-garde. For a short time along that journey I worked with a colleague who had come from LVMH. She told me once that the industry was populated by “poets and accountants”. A sobering and description of the polarity that typically characterizes the tension between creatives and business planners.
real people, requires designing for real production. That design conceived with an insensitivity to reproduction will be unlikely to make the journey into the lives of real people and perhaps remain the exclusive domain of the wealthy. That products born in production without the passionate designer serving as proxy for the final consumer could fail to fully engage with real people, winding up instead as devalued and irrelevant commodities or even fodder for the waste stream.
Living in Denmark and working at ECCO for a couple of years now, my understanding of what is really meant by the descriptor ‘Danish Modern’ deepened somewhat. To my mind Danish Modern refers, at least in part, to a deeply noble impulse of the movement’s pioneers to construct a bridge between the world of poets and that of accountants.
This notion remains deeply engrained in ECCO’s values today. To understand the word ‘modern’ in this context is to understand why modernity often transcends trend, fashion and even taste. Thought of as a static destination, modern is a place that can never be reached as long as design, engineering, production and route-to-market can all still be innovated. And we know that they all can, and always will be. Modern is not a destination, it’s a journey. Newer forces in our industry, like sustainability on one hand and digitization on the other, demand modernity be reframed and moved a little further down the horizon yet again.
An ethos emerging in Denmark during the period between the 1930s and 1970s, Danish Modern’s agenda seems to have been to harness, tame, optimize and ultimately humanize the sometimes-brutal force and unwieldy scale of postindustrialrevolution production technologies. On a very nearly spiritual level, to manifest the deeper ideals of Danish Modern is to share the conviction that delivering beauty, quality and high function into the lives of real or “ordinary” people requires that we design for production. In other words; to believe that; designing for
By challenging the student teams to conceptualize and produce a program that spans product iterations from “mild” to “wild”, and to consider the entire supply chain, we are coaxing them to keep the spirit of Danish Modern alive. The various footwear platforms the students work with have already been configured for the demands of production as it exists today. Our own designers and engineers have already conceived each of them within the framework; design for real people requires designing for real production. But these young talents can be
by Liam Maher
characterized as residing way over on the extreme “poets” side of my former colleagues’ dichotomy. That is as it should be. We need their poetry to be as pure and uncompromising as possible if we are to futureproof our industry. But this year’s batch of students demonstrated again that they will not settle with producing poetry alone. In their projects they have confronted all of the stages from the first creative spark all the way across the supply chain and into the lives of the consumers they’ve sought to satisfy. Along with precocious executions of branding, communication and the consumer experience, they have also integrated their own responses to the growing challenge of sustainability and digitization. Perhaps this makes them considerably more than mere poets. It certainly makes them more than accountants. Perhaps it makes them the living legacy of the great framers of Danish Modern. Folks like Tønder native and shoemaker’s son Hans Wegner and the other luminaries who drove Danish Modern’s original epoch. For anyone who regards Danish Modern as a moment-in-time to be appreciated mostly with a combination of reverence and nostalgia and always in retrospect, the signals imprinted within the student work on display here might inspire a reassessment.
About the author: Liam Maher is VP Global Creative Director at ECCO Sko A/S. He has worked in footwear and fashion for more than thirty years. In the mid-nineties he directed global creative services for Timberland. Over the years he has consulted for a range of footwear brands from Doc Martens to Visvim, and his own collections for Denham featured leather outerwear as well as footwear capsule-collections.
amarins abma christine bjerregaard kristensen ditte krogsgaard kristin rummler emma wedeman oscar emil madsen petra vicianovรก
4mal me
target persona Max Johansson, age 28. Lives in a flat in Gothenburg. Former employee at Volvo. Started up his own car company. Prefers natural colours. Believes in nature, equality and gender-neutralism.
4mal me
vision We believe in a future where gender is not a question. A future that focuses on the individual, the me. The choices, preferences and personality of the individual. We aim to make the high heel shoe a part of this future. A shoe that is formal yet practical, fulfilling different purposes for the wearer with multiple needs. A shoe for the modern world and mindset. And yet, a shoe that takes us back in history.
4mal me
theme My blurred clarity.
4mal me
4mal me
sustainable approach Multifunctionality. Modularity. Environmentally friendly materials. Long aesthetic lifetime.
4mal me
4mal me
ananya broker parekh maria villadsen line jørgensen nana øager simon galansky sidsel dauv alexandra jonsdottir
boldash
boldash
theme The playful deceit of elegance.
T E C H N I C A L D R AW I N G S / / P Y R A M I D boldash
boldash
boldash
sustainable approach Giving the product a longer lifespan. Using leftover leather scraps to create a different kind of material. Creating emotional value and a personal connection to the product.
boldash
boldash
boldash
keywords Illusion. Playful. Elegant. Two-faced.
LOVE & HATE
by Kristel Peters
How do you decide what topic to teach students whom you have not met before? The first question that comes to mind while preparing an assignment is: ‘Who are these young people? What do they like? What do they not like and why?‘
We say, maybe a hundred times a day, that we ‘like’ something. We do not say it out loud, but on social networking websites, by clicking on an icon designed for that purpose – a simple thumb or even just the word ‘like’ – we indicate that we think something is good on that website: filtered pictures on Instagram, true and false stories on Facebook, a witty tweet, …. ‘To LIKE’ has a number of meanings expressing approval on social networks. It means to Enjoy – to Feel Attraction towards or take pleasure in; to Regard – to feel positive towards; to Want – to wish to have, or to Choose/to Prefer – to be suitable or agreeable to and to feel inclined. When we ‘like’ something or someone very much, we use the word LOVE. The catch, however, is that the opposite, ‘dislike’, ends up being HATE. Linearly visualised, ‘like’ is actually situated somewhere between the stronger feelings of LOVE & HATE. Although LOVE & HATE seem to be each other’s opposites, these feelings are actually closely related and, above all, one does not exist without the other; it is what attracts us and repels us. According to Søren Kierkegaard, love goes beyond attraction. Love is that which cannot disappear or turn into hatred. Emedocles even talks about two forces of nature. They are the beginning and the end of all things in life.
LOVE is something we are all looking for; we seek love by expressing what and who we love: we are searching for ourselves – for something that is close to us. Psychologists, primatologists and neuroscientists have defined LOVE as an intense and complex feeling of deep affection. In short, this strong emotion is a universal language.
Asking students what they LOVE & HATE is asking who they really are. You love your family, your friends, food, colours and music, and there are things or people for whom you feel the opposite. Deep or superficial, this friction of emotions is there and it is stronger than the individual component. Ask why, and the students will find the stories behind their language. It is when they start to share, when they come to know each other and understand each other’s backgrounds that they finally come to the essence of what really drives them. The story of LOVE & HATE is in all of us.
About the author: Kristel Peters was visiting teacher at the ECCO shoe design course. She is a shoe designer with more than fifteen years of experience in the shoe business and international fashion industry. Her work is a combination of craftsmanship, experiments with bio-materials and state-of-art technology. She is founding partner of studio COJAK – a design and consulting office, collaborating in co-creative process with companies, fashion houses and universities exploring future materials through shoe- and accessories design.
amalia holmberg dominika majewska jacob kirkegaard nanna kastberg kĂŚseler marie broe marcelino trinidad gĂłmez
camino
scenario YRAMIDE The year is 2030. The world has been YRAMIDE ravaged by global warming. Extreme weather conditions have become the new YRAMIDE normal. Scorching hot summers. Raging snowstorms are common in winter.
Though the weather has changed radically, society remains largely the same. Against all odds, humanity has adapted. People in 2030 still work nine to five jobs, have children, live and die like in today’s world. The future is bright and holds new technology, which helps people traverse the elements of the future.
07/
ex
YRAMIDE YRAMIDE YRAMIDE
P P P
0
P P P
camino
camino
To prepare for the extreme weather he adorns his specially designed shoes, a process which he has ritualised. The shoes are rich in specialised materials and it is a complex task to put them on, a task which he enjoys. When the shoes are on, he is ready to venture out into the raging storm beyond his front door.
In this world we meet Gustaf, a modern man plagued by the stress of modern life. He has a job in which people trust him and he needs to be in control. To get away from the stress at work, he escapes to the outside. In nature, he can be alone and feel small amongst the raging elements.
target persona
camino
camino
camino
sustainable approach In 2030 shoes are a prized possession. Shoes last a lifetime and are used to traverse both desert and snow. Due to the depletion of the ozone layer, cows have been subjugated to direct radiation of the sun, and as a result of this, cows have changed drastically. Their once thick hides have become thin and almost transparent. Cow leather, as we know it today, has become a luxury material. But still the the future looks bright. Today’s experimental materials, such as Kombucha and fish leather have become common and have largely replaced cow leather. A breathable and self-repairing material has been invented. A material that adapts to the climate, opens and closes to let the foot breathe and offers protection when needed.
camino
emalie lise dam christensen freja hørberg laura poulsen kitt katharina reffstrup guillaume roy cille andersen
endo
Unstable balance.
theme
endo
Matt, born 1986 in Houston, Texas, next to the NASA Space Center. Reporter at National Geographic. Married to Alice. Currently in the final round of the Mars One selection.
target persona
endo
endo
endo
vision How might we create a collection for Earth, inspired and driven by the anticipated challenges of the Mars settlement inside the Mars One program?
endo
endo
sarah l. alsing emma agersø michelle aurora pedersen wrya aziz megan krahn szu chen tung
futo
futo
target persona Molly Chiang, 27. Creative director and influencer. Wears a mix of styles to make a personal mark.
futo
futo
futo
theme Shoe collection made for Molly for the Nuit Blanche Festival.
futo
futo
sustainable approach How might we extend the life cycle of the ECCO sole?
Shoe Matter / Shoe(s) Matter(s)
Materials carry us through life. From we are born and until we die, we put materials on our feet and call them shoes. Homey on the inside, hardy or expressive on the outside, they provide us with physical comfort, functional performance and aesthetic joy. Do we know the materials that clad our feet? In most cases, our guess would be no. Perhaps we can recognise one material amongst the many visible and invisible complex material components, but think no further of where it comes from. Extracted from the earth? Sourced from an animal? Harvested and processed by someone somewhere or made up in a laboratory? It didn’t used to matter as long as the shoe fitted our feet as well as our needs. But it does matter now. The time of blissful ignorance of material and resource usage is no longer. Climate change, environmental pollution and species extinction call for us all to act, in conscious and ethical ways, to prevent harm being done and to make change for the better. This includes designers. Every time a designer selects a material, the choice is a design act that has an impact on the Planet and its inhabitants. It is the designer’s responsibility to make as good choices as possible. But how do we know what the best material choice is, when sustainability is the goal? Are there even any clear answers to this question? And if there are, how can designers navigate through them? This is what we are addressing in the Material Narratives ECCO, the artistic development project being conducted in 2019. The objective of the project is to investigate materials and sustainability in the context of shoe design. The project is carried out in two interconnected parts. One part of the project seeks to understand how the ECCO shoe project has developed, from a materials perspective, over the past seven years, in order to elicit guideposts and potentials for future work,
by Ulla Ræbild and Karen Marie Hasling
among other things looking at ongoing movements in technology use and designer roles. The other part of the project seeks to develop learning and teaching tools to support students’ and designers’ work with materials and sustainability and thereby contribute to an overview and a clarification within this complex area. Background The current Material Narratives ECCO project builds on earlier work we have conducted in relation to design and sustainability. In 2016-2017 we developed the project known as the Sustainable Design Cards, which is a learning and navigation tool for actors in and around design (Hasling & Ræbild, 2017). Through tests of the tool in industry and academia, we have gained insights into the usability for instructors and learners (Ræbild & Hasling, 2018), and we have found that it is especially conducive for embedding sustainability at the concept level in the design process – also articulated as ‘practical sustainability’ – as opposed to a compartmentalised or add-on understanding of sustainability. From 2017, the team of instructors and ECCO jointly decided to incorporate sustainability into the design brief, and furthermore it was decided to implement the Sustainable Design Cards as a key tool for the students to work with. This meant that the brief has been transformed from being primarily an artistic and functional challenge, to being a more complex design situation where lifecycles, user behaviour and resources must be considered in tandem with, or as a driver for, the conceptual development. From what we can assess, the change in the brief has positively affected the design results,
which we will discuss further below. Another impacting factor in the last couple of years has been the amazing opportunity provided by ECCO to develop prototypes with professional technicians and the chance to embed 3D printing. We have always been painfully aware that the area of materials was covered rather cursorily in the Sustainable Design Cards. The topic is so vast that it seemed to encompass an entire ‘landscape’ of its own. Therefore, we have conducted this project in order to zoom in on material, and do so in the same visual language and under the same conceptual and theoretical framework as the Sustainable Design Cards. In this way, the two tools speak to each other and can be used complementarily to further deepen the understanding. Designers can thus develop sustainable design and business concepts and at the same time make considered and perhaps more informed material choices. Maybe designers will begin to consider materials as the first thing that drives a design process. Maybe they will realise a need to develop their own materials, to truly understand material and ecological systems. There are many approaches to the role of materials in design development, but we have observed a steep increase in what is known as Material Driven Design, and students look in this direction, also in the ECCO shoe project. Emphasis on materials use in design processes A driver for the project has been an identified need for increasingly (re)considering the role of materials in design and the need for a stronger integration of materials into design processes. This is in line with a general development in the materials in the design research field, which, after decades
of being ‘material-distant’ due to increased technologization and globalisation, has now returned to ‘material-near’ and ‘material-aware’ ways of approaching design. In addition to Material Driven Design (Karana, Barati, Rognoli, & van der Laan, 2015) – design processes driven by a material rather than by a need or a function – this opens up for strategies on materials use focussing for example on systems of materials, materials traceability and CMF design. Collection and mapping of material approaches For the exploration of material approaches and application in students’ work we have collected data from all 76 ECCO shoe projects spanning the period 2012–2018, an in-depth view over a longer time span. Furthermore, we have collected data from a number of courses conducted at Design School Kolding in the academic year 2018–2019, where either material approaches or materials and sustainability has been in focus, a broad view but within a short time span. We collected this data in order to understand the current material use at Design School Kolding overall and thus bring a contextual framework to the analysis of the ECCO data. The additional courses included are Materials and Sustainability (Fashion and Textiles, BA 3rd semester), Material Investigations (Textiles and Industrial Design, BA 5th semester) and Material Narratives (Design for Planet, MA 1st semester). Altogether, the data includes 110 projects. After gathering the empirical material from publications and students’ presentations, we have developed a template format in which each project is registered with visual imagery, year and name. During the analysis process it is positioned within two complementary materials approach models. The first model becomes part of sustainable design by considering a multiple-loop approach –‘slow’, ‘circular’, ‘bio-based’ and
‘bio-inspired’ (Mestre & Cooper, 2017). The authors argue that by combining diverse mindsets in different phases of the product life cycle, a holistic circular design becomes stronger and more likely to succeed. We have used this model to understand how students have approached projects within a sustainable design discourse, deliberately or not, and how this can further strengthen their narratives. The second model structures the origin of resources in do-it-yourself materials design in five categories i.e. ‘vegetabile’ (from plants and fungi), ‘animale’ (from animals and bacteria), ‘ladideum’ (from minerals), ‘recuperavit’ (from recovered resources) and ‘mutantis’ (from technological mixes and hybridisations of industrial resources) (Ayala Garcia, Rognoli, & Karana, 2017). In this project, the model has offered a way to describe the variation of materials used in the students’ projects. By physically laying out all filled in templates in chronological order, project by project, our intention has been to see whether developments could be brought forward and identified, for example, as visually identifiable changes during the time period, or as embedded biases in the students’ material preferences uncovered through the position mapping in the conceptual models.
Development of a material tool We have leaned on previous experience from the Sustainable Design Cards and their use of a product lifetime compass (Hasling & RĂŚbild, 2017). The compass illustrates how approaches to sustainable design can be positioned by means of three product lifetime understandings: a technical lifetime, a functional lifetime and an emotional lifetime. We see that the same compass is a suitable means to demonstrate how materials approaches can target different areas. The picture (to the X) shows an early brainstorming session positioning approaches to materials in sustainable design based on the lifetime compass. Further work The project aims to understand and support new potentials in relation to material application in shoe design. As the project is still ongoing, possible insights from both parts of the project, as well as experience with testing the final tool, will not be included here. After the completion of the project at the end of 2019, an open source report documenting the project and its findings will become available. Acknowledgements The project is conducted by four people. Apart from us, the authors, we have engaged two student assistants from the MA Design for Planet programme, Iiris Herttua and Ashna Patel, in order to secure a student/learning perspective in the development process. They both have a BA background in fashion, but currently work with interdisciplinary and material-driven approaches to design. In addition to having received financial support for this project from ECCO, the development of the materials in the sustainable design tool is also supported by The Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship.
About the authors Ulla Ræbild joined the ECCO shoe design course as a guest lecturer. She is Assistant Professor and heads the Design for Planet MA programme at Design School Kolding. Her work is centred on fashion design, sustainability and design methodology, and she has extensive experience in bridging research and practice in fashion design education. Karen Marie Hasling is Assistant Professor at Design School Kolding. Her main areas of expertise are material studies, sustainability and design methodology.
References Ayala Garcia, C., Rognoli, V., & Karana, E. (2017). Five Kingdoms of DIY Materials for Design. Alive. Active. Adaptive, 222–234. Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Hasling, K. M., & Ræbild, U. (2017). Sustainability Cards: Design for Longevity. Proceedings of PLATE 2017 – Product Lifetimes and the Environment, 166–170. Delft, the Netherlands. Karana, E., Barati, B., Rognoli, V., & van der Laan, A. Z. (2015). Material Driven Design (MDD): A Method to Design for Material Experiences. International Journal of Design, 9(2), 35–54. Mestre, A., & Cooper, T. (2017). Circular Product Design. A Multiple Loops Life Cycle Design Approach for the Circular Economy. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S1620–S1635. Ræbild, U., & Hasling, K. M. (2018). Sustainable Design Cards: A Learning Tool for Supporting Sustainable Design Strategies. In K. Niinimäki (Ed.), Sustainable Fashion in a Circular Economy (pp. 128–151). Helsinki: Aalto University.
freja emilie krĂŚmmer anja refslund ladefoged anna wad clausen julia falkenberg pernille rosendahl jensen gĂĄspĂĄr norbert iszlai
mirum
mirum
Destruction for construction. Working with the duality of something growing out of destruction and the way objects and materials without value can be given new life.
theme
mirum
vision How might we design a shoe which manifests the use of honest materials derived from waste and which reflects the contradictory and disturbing problems facing the world?
mirum
sustainable approach Technical durability The shoe collection has a long lifespan and wears well with Maximilian’s everyday use. We have worked with traditional leather from ECCO and cow rumen leather, materials of high durability, tear strength and flexibility, combined with long lasting and recyclable steel parts of high tensile strength. Upcycling It is essential for us that the materials are either upcycled or recycled. Cow rumen is a biproduct of the meat industry. When used as leather, it has a beautiful structure, adding a new aesthetic touch to the shoe. The metal is scrap steel. By working with upcycling and adding new value to materials usually not considered valuable, we leave a more sustainable footprint in the world. Aesthetic lifetime We aim to create a shoe collection whose aesthetic expression will change over time as a result of the biodegradable material which will slowly dissolve, leaving the long-lasting materials to stand out.
mirum
target persona Maximilian, 28. During the daytime he works as a camera man for a local TV production company in Amsterdam. At night, driven by a strong sense of justice, he hacks computer databases and takes compromising photographs in order to expose the truth of those who ‘fuck the system’.
mirum
mirum
andreas kĂźbar sidonie teikiteetini emma baverel morten pedersen siw brochstedt mai larsen rigmor anna reher
olga
olga
Olga, 64, Danish psychologist. Confident, creative, adventurous. Loves travelling and exploring cities and nature. Equally loves spending time with family, friends and grandchildren. Indifferent to her age and what people think. Whenever possible, she practices climbing, hiking and other extreme sports.
target persona
olga
vision How might we design a sustainable shoe that can be used for everyday adventures with a focus on healthy comfort and ‘psycho-playfulness’?
olga
theme The contrast between organic and geometric forms.
olga
olga
olga
sustainable approach Creating a strong and meaningful bond between the shoe and its owner. The shoe must be like a mirror, keeping up with all the emotions and struggles the owner might have. A true friend and companion.
In the Future our Feet may be Wrapped in Seaweed and Blended Leather
by Design School Kolding
It is an enormous strain on the Planet’s resources when annually 300 million pairs of shoes end up in the world’s rubbish bins. To remedy this, students from Design School Kolding have designed a concept for a sneaker for ECCO Sko A/S made of 100 per cent recyclable materials. We and our children are going to pay the price unless we make an effort to tidy up after the world’s extravagant consumer party, says one of the young designers. The shoe was nominated for a 2019 Danish Design Award. Seaweed, reeds and shredded leather remnants. Iconic furniture classics. Waves and shrieking seagulls along the Danish shorelines. And a world under heavy strain in terms of resources. These are some of the elements incorporated into a design project in which a group of students from Design School Kolding has collaborated with ECCO Sko A/S on the development of a concept for a shoe collection, ECCO SEALO, which sets new standards for sustainability in the production of quality footwear. The premise for the design has been a sustainable collection inspired by Danish tradition and culture.
Bachelors behind the design. “For the past so many years the world has been having an extravagant consumption party without any consideration of the effect on the environment. We must tidy up now, because we and our children are the ones who are going to pay the price if we do not change our behaviour drastically. And I am actually in a position to push things, because from the very outset Design School Kolding has taught me an awareness and given me the knowledge and the competencies to effect change.”
rest of ECCO’s production. In addition to its globally renowned footwear brand, ECCO is also one of the world’s largest leather manufacturers, supplying leather to global luxury brands. This means that the company has full control of the supply chain and the sustainability at its many tanneries, where only the highestquality parts of the hides end up as shoes. The students have dived into the rubbish bins and blended the many leather remnants into a fine granulate which, mixed with the resin, has been transformed into durable uppers on the welldesigned sneakers.
Chopped seaweed and plant glue Durability challenges the use-and-discard fashion “ECCO has always been concerned with producing quality footwear with a longer life than the ordinary use-and-discard fashion, long before sustainability came to be listed high on the agenda all over the world. But sustainability is becoming increasingly important – both for our designers, for the production and, not least, for our customers,” says Liam Maher, global Creative Director at ECCO Sko A/S referring to the project. “Young customers in particular, far more than previous generations, acknowledge the value of a sustainable brand and of working with a purpose. Therefore, it is crucial that tomorrow’s designers place sustainability high on their agendas.”
The SEALO shoe is based on the classic ECCO sole and is available in three versions each with its own history and choice of material. The collection is based on an ‘Haute Couture’ model, made of seaweed, that is inspired by the Danish shorelines. That in itself is a small miracle of sustainability, because seaweed can be harvested gently, it cleanses the sea of excess nutrients and it also has an antibacterial effect. The hybrid model is made of reeds with inspiration from the braided seats on popular Danish design chairs such as the Y-chair and the Folkestolen. With their timeless designs, high comfort and simple materials they are virtually indestructible – and worth restoring. In either case, seaweed or reeds are chopped into confetti and bound together with a plant-based component adhesive called resin.
Born into a culture of sustainability “Sustainability is not a subject of debate in our generation,” says Silke Foged, who is one of the five newly graduated
Leather remnants become new uppers And this commercial model fits like a (leather) glove into the
Gender neutral model for 100 years Provided ECCO wants to be relevant for a young, global audience the design must be up-to-date. “We chose our inspiration from one of the world’s best-selling shoes, namely the classic basketball boot,” says Simone Bakke Vestergaard from the school’s Fashion Design programme. “The boot is really a classic, it is almost 100 years old, and in addition it is gender neutral so it can be used by men and women and across all generations.” Predating the Global Development Goals With the adoption of the UN Global Goal for Sustainable Development in 2015 and the general awareness of the pressure on global resources, sustainability has gradually become part of most companies’ and institutions’ agendas. But the dedication to sustainability is old news at Design School Kolding. “For
more than 15 years, we have had a sharp focus on working with the environmental impact of the fashion and the textile industry,” says Helle Graabæk, who is the Programme Manager for Textile Design at the design school and also holds the reins in the partnership that the school has had with ECCO for the past nine years. “This focus has spread to other disciplines over time, because design has proved to be an effective tool for both raising awareness of the world’s challenges and also for solving them. And this is where the magic comes to life when our students, with their combination of sustainability and design, have the opportunity to test their talents at well-established brands with resources and ambitions. ” Forward-looking strategy in a flexitarian world “We have incorporated sustainability into all aspects of the shoe,” says Silke Foged and gives a few examples. “Instead of a shoe box, the shoes are sold in a bag made of hemp that can be reused as a handbag. To protect the shoes in the bag, a piece of cardboard is wrapped around them, where we have drawn and described the circular sustainability concept for the consumer. And, in addition to utilising the remnants from the shoe production fully, the use of the leather granulate contributes to future-proofing ECCO’s production in case we will be eating less meat in the future and hence will have fewer hides at our disposal. ” Thoughtful Sportswear Silke is currently a project manager at Pond Textile, the company that has developed the resin, made of starch from biowaste, that is used for the shoe. She is working on developing plant-based and biodegradable materials that can become the world’s alternative to the oil-based polyester that we know today. Simone Bakke Vestergaard designs sportswear for the
sports brand Hummel, where she incorporates considerations of climate, the environment and people into all processes. Despite their, so far, relatively limited experience, they both feel that, in the SEALO project and in their jobs today, they have sufficient courage, creativity and knowledge to push the established players when it comes to integrating sustainability deep into the core of any project. Hackers for the planet “As newly graduated designers, it is also easier for us to effect change because we are not trapped in old routines and habits. When working with partners, who otherwise are in firm control of their way of working, we often barge in and hack a process or a mindset. Our concern for the future of the planet is a rock-solid part of our DNA, and therefore something happens when we gaze at a project from a new angle. We are not afraid to challenge established norms, because we know that there is no way around it. And sometimes very little is needed.” ECCO’s Creative Director: The future is in good hands “Collaboration with students is part and parcel of who we are here at ECCO, and even we professional designers are being taught a lesson in the power and potential of unrestrained, raw creativity,” says Liam Maher of ECCO. “In an established brand like ours it’s easy to get caught up in the conventional thoughts about types of consumers, price, distribution and things like that. But the students remind us that ultimately creativity is up to us. They come up with new priorities, values and experiences and their reality reflects issues related to gender norms, the digital world, culture and pop culture in an entirely new fashion. This creates optimism at the ECCO team. If our industry and our brand end up in the hands of people like them, we are looking at a bright future. ”
About ECCO SEALO ECCO SEALO is the concept for a footwear collection, designed for ECCO Sko A/S by a team of students from Design School Kolding as part of the partnership agreement between ECCO and the school. In 2018, the premise from the school was a sustainable project inspired by Danish tradition and culture. On ECCO’s part, the premise was a three-tier collection with an artistic premier model at the top as a creative framework for the concept, a commercialisable model for potential production and a hybrid that bridges both of them. About the project participants The team from Design Kolding Kolding consists of Silke Foged (Textile Design), Simone Bakke Vestergaard (Fashion Design), Niclas Henriksen (Fashion Design), Jeppe Ask Jensen (Industrial Design) and Aurelie Varga (Accessory Design). Helle Graabæk is the Programme Manager for Textile Design at the Design School and the coordinator of the collaboration with ECCO. ECCO Sko A/S is represented by Liam Maher, VP Global Creative Director, ECCO Sko A/S, Tina Seirup Nielsen, Chief of Staff, Design Studio, ECCO Sko A/S and Ejnar Truelsen, Chief Designer, ECCO Sko A/S in addition to numerous technical staff and designers from ECCO, who participated in the pilot project. About the nomination ECCO SEALO was nominated in the Danish Design Awards category ‘Visionary Concepts’ and was among the finalist in 2019. The jury said about the project: “Reuse of materials for shoes is as important as for garments. About 300 million pairs of shoes are discarded every year. ECCO’s collaboration with Design School Kolding aims to address the issue from a Danish design and a craft perspective and is thus an important starting point for long-term solutions. ”
camilla søby sofie frederikke sølvhøj heinesen mads kodbøl vindelev jørgensen klara birgisdóttir linnéa hagborg katy wilkinson-feller anne malmmose bak sørensen
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target personas Milton, 21. His dad passed away and now he lives with his mother and their dog in the woods. Studies architecture and finds inspiration in the environmental issues surrounding him. Likes to go climbing – sometimes with his mother. Wears contrast colours mixed with basic colours.
Agnes, 55, Milton’s mother. Works as a cook. Experiments with sustainable cooking and uses her self-sufficent home as an inspiration in her work. In her spare time she likes to go climbing by herself or with Milton. Wears natural materials such as wool, wood and leather and colours that stand out, especially red.
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vision
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A unisex shoe, cross-generational to preserve resources. Multifunctional and adaptable to a changing weather environment with high water levels, freezing winters and dry summers. Traditional handcraft mixed with innovative aesthetic design.
Shoe-pyramid
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People need to use and reuse the materials that are already there: wood, fibres, rubber and plastic. New materials are also being invented, and therefore the shoes are a mix of both old and new.
SkĂĽne, Sweden, year 2050. The environment is radically different due to climate changes. The water levels have risen and it is warmer and colder than ever.
scenario
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The shoe collection is modular, unisex and can be worn by different generations, making it shareable and prolonging its lifetime. All materials – wood, reused rubber, plastic and climbing equipment – are from the local area and have fulfilled a different purpose before being used in the shoes.
sustainable approach
clara gram minni wendy shelagh bennett selma bĂŚkkeskov momme nielsen isabella wennemoes carlsen kjartan almar kĂĄrason
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theme Traditional distortion.
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sustainable approach Informal sharing with your extended family. Locally sourced materials: yak leather, natural rubber, bamboo fibre.
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Lecturers Helle GraabĂŚk is head of the ECCO programme at Design School Kolding and in charge of the overall planning of the collaboration as well as putting together a strong team of lecturers. As a textile designer, Helle provides the students with a strong hands-on understanding of the value of working in depth with the tactile and material qualities of the shoe.
Trine Skjoldan Kallesøe is an expert technician and designer within the craft of footwear. She works as a consultant for several shoe brands, covering a wide variety of functional needs. Trine brings professional prototyping and production competences and knowledge used in the footwear business.
Kristel Peters is a shoe designer with many years of experience from the luxury industry. Knowing the vast amount of shoes that end up in landfills every year, she wants to push the shoe industry in a more sustainable direction. Kristel ensures that the students are introduced to the process of developing sustainable concepts and sketching both 2D and 3D when developing a shoe collection from prototype to final product.
Ejnar Truelsen is a shoe designer and an honorary professor at Design School Kolding. He is the designer behind some of ECCO’s greatest commercial hits and a quintessential representative of the ECCO design culture. Ejnar supports the students in their ideation work and in bridging the gap between design school concept and commercial reality.
Anne Poesen is a shoe designer who is particular strong in the idea development and sketching process. She brings in competences in relation to international business understanding as well as collection and line building. Anne makes sure that the students are introduced to the complexity of shoe design, addressing ergonomic, functional and sustainability issues.
Patrick Johansen brings knowledge from the field of industrial design and production, including ergonomics and 3D digital modelling techniques. Patrick ensures that the students get the necessary skills to design advanced 3D prototypes and communicate their concept and the products designed in a professional way.
Michael Thomson supports teams, business and organisations around the world in evolving their visions and strategies for growth. He ensures that the individual students have the competences they need for contributing to the teamwork, enabling the team to create synergy and communicate the value of their ideas and visions in a business context.
Line Rebecca Rumhult is head of the shoe, fur and leather workshops at Design School Kolding. With her background in fashion and shoe design, Line supports the students in obtaining a high level of quality in their work with the physical prototypes of the shoe designs they are developing during the ECCO project.
love shoe. hate shoe. What attracts us? What repels us? What makes us love or hate something? In this book, nine cross-disciplinary groups of students from Design School Kolding’s departments of fashion, textile, accessory and industrial design show a range of shoe collections developed from these basic questions. This education project is part of the long-standing strategic collaboration between Design School Kolding and ECCO.