Paper Shoes

We've started out in More w/ Less making paper shoes that support our own weight. Well paper sandals really. It's all really a prototyping exercise for making real shoes out of recycled materials. I concentrated on making mine out of similar strips of material, partially out of a desire to give myself some constraints and partially out of a desire to be able to mass produce the building blocks of my design! On all of the shoes I concentrated on the structural design of the soles supporting the three main pressure areas from human feet. Our heels (a big point pressure), the ball of your foot, and the big toe (which is used a pushing off point in our strides). I tried to concentrate material around these areas.

I'll show my favorite and strongest of my three shoes first. I built them using 12"x1" strips of sketch book paper and rolling them in to small, medium and large cylinders and gluing the individual cylinders together. It created a very strong and robust platform which was still flexible for the foot to move with. I was very happy with the sole of these shoes and my class and professor seemed to appreciate them as well for their aesthetic value (no one else had anything like mine) and strength.

The second set of shoes, a material heavy explosion of zig zaged bristol board cut into 12"x1/2" strips. They were ok on strength ( the sides were prone to buckling if you stood off center) and just looked cluttered.

The third set of sandals were a direct response to the second pair, where I used lots of material on both of the other sets, I wanted to use less material here. These are 12"x1/2" bristol board strips, folded into layered triangles. I was pretty happy, with these, except for the heel. In a late night and I was tired oversight, the triangles of the heel extend out from under the sole piece and really break up the familiar lines of the shoe. It really hurts the design. I shouldn't have been doing these at the late hour I was though.

The big problem with my sandals was that again because it was late and I was tired, I didn't think of how to attach the straps for your feel to the soles until after the soles were finished. It produced much less than stellar results. I'm not even going to show the pictures. Jan was instructing me to really spend some time looking at my cylinder design and figuring out where to take if from here specifically pertaining to large cylinder, small cylinder layout and integrating straps.

It's interesting to look at the issue with the straps and how I got sucked into viewing only the soles as the major issue to design around in paper shoes and apply that to my design process as a whole. I think I'm really missing a step where partially through each step (say, sketching, sketch models, prototyping etc) I take a step back and see where I'm headed and try to identify problem areas. I'll be working on improving on that this semester.

Thanks for reading!