0:01 Hello, every my name isaskov, architect and computational designer, innovation teamay revolutionary shift how and where shows are made and what performance can achieve. On is a premium sports brand that is based in Switzerland, known for for its performance innovation, combining technology, design, and sustainability. Indeed, technological innovation is at the heart, where the innovation is driven mainly by continuous experimentation with that. Light Spray is a very good example of this mindset, because it’s a new approach that combines computational design, robotics, and new material system, to rethink how we makes performance, and maybe what that other industries to.

1:00 So, for decades, the sports industry has relied on multistep shoes for athletes and also for everyday people. Conventional processes usually involved a lot of parts made out of very different materials, and a lot of money, work in assembling them. This means that the supply chains are resources waste, of course, however they limit our control over local performance, over fit, or over material efficiency.

1:47 Spray is technology that robotics and material innovation to bring this industry disrupting process that creates ultra light, seamless er in a single step. So here the upper is sprayed, not built, directly onto performance, in just minutes, by eliminating all intermediate steps. It also means that reduces parts, was, and emissions. Performance running, the Cloud Strike LS, will you more about it later, but also see it over there, and you canose. So Light Spray has quite an interesting origin. It started as, it was inspired as a Halloween decoration, or hot spraying spider webs, that Johannes from In team, and before, the very first Light Spray set that can be seen here, very different from what we have today.

2:54 It was indeed just a spray gun, and a lot of experimentation in material, in texture, in machinery. But maybe one of the most interesting aspects of this technology is that, to this very unique manufacturing process, it creates a material system that is fully programmable. The fabrication method is additive. It consists of the direct deposition of moloplastic material, which creates this plurality of loops. These loops are interconnected and super imposed in this way, to create this unique fabric.

3:39 Instead of the layer stacking, which we typically have in additive manufacturing techniques, here the layers are bonded by the crossings of these loops, and this is very good for us, because by controlling the fabrication parameters, we can very specific properties directly onto the material, zone by zone, and in this way we can create a graded fabric. This synergetic interaction between the geometry, spray, material system, and also it enables perform capacities.

4:23 So, how to get from a material system to a performance, since this Light Spray looks like that role of traditional food making manufacturing, we had to find new ways to design for it and with it. And this is why we implemented a computational workflow, where instead of manually drafting each element, as it is typical in the in the footwear industry, we would design the algorithms that generate, the generate and optimize the shapes and the material layouts. And because robots in general are programmable, here programming the robots mean directly programming the material properties, one to one. The workflow is super straight forward, we start with an input data that is usually qualitative, quantitative, that informs 3D parametric model, generating two parts for the robotic fabrication.

5:30 Allows us to create very wide design space, that is from the restrictions of traditional manufacturing, and we can generate, we can explore, we can generate, produce, and test very fast, and this allows us to unlock a new performance potential. So the the design of the Light Spray upper, it’s, take the Cloud Boom Strike as an example, starts from, it is made entirely in 3D, starts from a digital last and bottom that we have, that are matching exactly our physical, our physical assets. And thanks to the parametric process, we can control every aspect of the, in a holistic way, when we design the shape of the path, we define where and how the material is placed.

6:30 In the robots, by this we already designing it, performance fabrication constraints in it isous. And by varying the speed of the robot, we define zones with aperture reinforcement. And in this way we traditional blind, but a set of computational, but a computational model with a set of robotic instructions that contains information about the geometry, theetic, the performance, but also about the fabrication, or where the material goes and when. And we can control this process, in, we can control how the upper behaves. And because we design the the process together with the product, we believe that we manage to seamlessly integrate design and performance. The result is the Cloud Strike LS, it’s over there, you can see it later, which is, weighs only 30 gr, it contains 1.5 km of filament, it does not contain any seams or glue.

7:53 It does not have a struggle or so liner, and of course it’s a one step assembly process, with very minimal waste, producing 75% less CO2 compared to standard On shoes. Yeah. And also, contrary to, you know, what is commonly thought, that digital design takes us away from the physical world, here we actually went closer to it. You are able to really iterate and tweak every aspect of the upper onide, and we could do that every time while we were developing it.

8:36 Process allowed us to, this process allowed us to design and produce and test consistently, to be able to give to our athletes functional prototypes, which then the sport science team would feedback to us with a lot of data, until, this is how we were perfecting the process, and and working on it. Actually, some medals, one with our prototypes. But let’s say, in an industry which relies on established processes for production, how do you move an innovation from a prototype to scale?

9:15 It’s a very important question. The Light Spray factory is the first industrial production facility, which opened its doors just last week in our headquarters in Zic. It consists of robots and enables, for the very first time, to create the for performance shoes directly in Switzerland, on site, using automated and industrial scalable procedures. So one of the main enablers for this to happen is, of course, the automation.

9:50 Scaling up means negotiating the production setting with design, meaning that hardware and software are solving together. Integration is key to make that happen. Strike is our pilot project, it proves that the system works for elite performance, but also it shows the potential of a robust computational pipeline and automated workflow. Here you may see our branding applications, very similar process to the spraying, after the sprayed, fully automated, the branding is added through a fully automated process by inkjet printing. And this is a, this is a process that is much more efficient and cleaner than normal branding application, because it uses much less water, and also allows us for a higher design flexibility.

10:53 Also, Disney facility is a milestone in manufacturing, in mastering this manufacturing processes involved, and it demonstrates the flexibility and flexible capacities of such a technology. So, after all this in place, again, we need to ask, what are learning from development, and what could be. I think the most important one is that, this project, we had to design and making and bring them again closer together. This new manufacturing method made us trip away all the elements that are not contributing to performance. Design that we were following is that integration, and we are trying to move away from hyper differentiation, to tackling performance, production, and behavior together, in in a single step.

12:04 One of the biggest lessons, however, is a lot of things, even things that before taken for granted, for example, how the phototomy relates to the last, or how the material behaves when it is sprayed, which zone should be reinforced and which not. So we are keeping working with our athletes, to be able to learn from them how they experience Light Spray, so that we take this knowledge and we transfer it into our products. And finally, we used computational design in this project, in this, this work, not only for optimization and automation, but also as a, as a platform for a shared design, for a shared language, that allows us to integrate different expertise and knowledge and data, achieve design synthesis.

13:07 We are, until, we are also today doing the same, we are integrating different specialties very early into the design process, and we believe that this is what can differentiate us in the industry. Technology, thank.

13:39 For more information about the CDF computational design symposium series. To see the archives of previous presentations and to read about future events, visit CDFAM.com. Thank you.