0:00 Next one. Okay. Welcome to Computational Craft, one footwear designer’s quest to replace himself. I’m going to kind of situate this clickbaity title. You’ll have to kind of, you know, hold on until the end and we’ll I’ll take you on a journey of two design stories and, we’ll see if I end up succeeding in replacing myself. Not, you know, existentially cuz I’m here, but, you know, we’re we’re all thinking about it.

0:17 You know, how how do these computational tools like affect where we’re going to be in our careers in the future? So, quick retrospective. This is a snapshot of me as a industrial design student, you know, getting a classical industrial design education, sketching with markers, then sketching with an iPad when the iPad Pro came out and you know, making physical prototypes. I really wanted to work in footwear and was trying to find a way in.

0:40 It was fun seeing Carbons presentation because when their collaborative shoe with Adidas came out, that is what kind of first put computational design on my radar. Never heard of it before. My, you know, professors weren’t talking about it. And anyway, I I saw all those lattises and I was like, there’s no way that someone is doing this by hand the way that I’m designing everything. Like what, you know, what is this?

1:04 What do I do? So I, you know, dive into the internet, dive into the, you know, Grasshopper like McNeel forums and start reading about it and and absorbing everything that I can. So this is kind of where it starts where I, I get this idea in my head about like, oh, maybe I can replace what I think of as my role as a designer. Maybe I can be, you know, maybe I can design the process instead.

1:24 I can design, you know, I can design the black box. You know, as we were hearing earlier and maybe I can even get lost in it. And that that would be a, you know, maybe it was a lack of confidence as a student about being like, oh, I can, you know, maybe I’m not a great designer, but maybe I can design something that will be a great designer.

1:41 So this was me as a student, you know, human in the middle, the design space represented by this triangle and and the heat map being kind of my explorations with design tools, 2D sketching, manual CAD, physical prototyping, you know, whatever parameters you want to put on the space, these are pretty common ones in footwear or commercial product generally, cost, function, and aesthetic. So as I kind of got to the end of my degree and I was just, you know, self-eing all these new computational design skills, just like kind of reaching for the lowest hanging fruit that I could find, like, oh, Voronoi, great.

2:07 What’s that you know you know randomly populating a piece of geometry with points like what can I do with that what I found was that my experience kind of in this design space was changing that I was getting kind of extended in a way or I was realizing that there were parts of the space that I hadn’t even thought of exploring before so you know I still trying to keep myself at the center of it and anyway the the other interesting thing is that it also started to change like getting into computational design from an industrial design background was changing how I even thought about like the space itself.

2:43 So a lot of what happened is it brought you know for the first time it kind of brought data into my design process which before had been kind of very bow house like aesthetic driven about like oh I’ll just I I dream of beautiful platonic forms and I kind of draw them beautifully. And it made it messier but it also made the space bigger and and you know kind of represented in this like three-dimensional jump.

3:02 And so this this is kind of the story of what got me enamored with this and started my march into computational design. And I’m going to kind of contextualize that in two design stories from some you know commercial products that you may have seen on the market. If you’ve run in them, find me afterwards and I’ll you know give you a high five and thank you for keeping me employed.

But anyway, so this is the Freshflow Moore V4. It’s a was a really early project right when I arrived kind of like out of school, arrived at New Balance. Wanted to show them my like hybrid computational craft approach of saying like oh I’m going to I’m going to design something that designs the things. So one of the first things that I wanted to do once I got access to our our sports research lab data about you know all sorts of biometric data foot strikes and things is just make a dynamic visualization cuz I’m like oh I have grasshopper at my fingertips I can do this now.

3:50 You know, all of our graphs and things were kind of more static nature and, you know, really informative as graphs are, but I was thinking like, oh, it’s motion and also, you know, impress some people and maybe I’ll learn something. So, I put together this force you know, ground force reaction kind of vector data thing just for me to look at to to show to other people at the company and see if there’s, you know, I I wanted to learn something cuz I didn’t I hadn’t done any footwear before you know, professionally.

4:18 So, the thing that I noticed from this was that there was way more pressure in the kind of mid-foot stance part of the foot strike than I had expected. I was kind of like, yeah, you know, if you’re heel striking, you hit on your heel, you push off on your toe, that’s where the pressure is. But, you know, as all your body weight kind of shifts over your foot, that’s a, you know, that’s a really high pressure zone of the shoe, there’s a lot of downward force, and it’s also traditionally, you know, if you look at your own shoes, it’s like the narrowest part of the shoe, so you’ve got the least amount of material under it.

4:40 So, I kind of tucked that away. I said, “Oh, maybe maybe I can use that.” Again, an example of how the kind of data design space excuse me how that data design space was like expanding my own capabilities as a designer. It’s not something I would have noticed before. So, about this time I got put on a team. We got a design brief said we want to make our thickest midsole yet and we want it to be the softest midsole ever.

5:05 You know that we’ve ever made. And the first thing I thought was like, oh, is that, you know, is that going to be like a little unstable if the there’s a lot of material, you’re high off the ground and it’s really soft. So this, you know, this insight kind of kicked in. And I was excited to say, oh, this is it. Like I can design the black box.

5:18 I can, you know, I can be a computational designer. Like what I thought of at the time, I can replace myself. So I just kind of flipped the the data set of the ground reaction forces on its side and said, let’s let this define the bottom of the shoe. And you know wide bases are are stable you know a stable structure has a wide base that’ll be great it’ll be more stable.

5:38 So this is you know a quick kind of quick and dirty pseudo code of I was you know importing a last and doing some things to find you know like basically like a lot of mesh generation steps and and and bre representation of this data set and getting this really kind of fun but weird kind of mid-foot stability platform out of this. And so I was excited about this but it was a lot different than you know I was like oh I think the data is suggesting this I should do it.

6:06 But you know I needed to kind of sell the design team on it. And luckily in some of my other explorations again like I said I was kind of as I was learning to be a computational designer reaching for what’s the next thing that I can reach at least you know cuz I was like starting to see simulation and FEA stuff and saying oh can can I do that and turns out oh I can’t do that at the level of you know like Jesus having the the car crash background but at that point I was like well I think I can do it in 2D and maybe I can kind of do it like a soft body simulation in an animation software and maybe there’s still some overlap there.

6:38 So, you know, young maybe a little bit naive and went for it. So, I I’d already kind of done these tests on like little cube cross-sections and I had a wide base one and I said, “Okay, let’s let’s take that and let’s scale that up you know to a cross-section of a shoe cuz I wanted to try to persuade the team to say make this weird shaped shoe.

6:58 It’s wider in a weird place, but that will, you know, that will make the foot more stable.” So, I have kind of a vertical control cross-section here. We’re pushing it side to side. You know, just this cross-section of the shoe and then the flared base. You can see they’re kind of superimposed over each other. And what I felt like, again, my kind of rough simulation was telling me was like, yeah, you know, it kind of makes sense that wide base will be a lot more stable.

So, here’s again a little quick kind of behind the scenes of, you know, I mean, a lot of you are familiar with this. I don’t really need to explain it, but just, you know, I’m getting into Grasshopper and Kangaroo and saying, okay, how do I break things down into elements? How do I make sure those elements try to hold their shape? How do I apply forces? So, it was, you know, kind of a big stretch, again, a big stretch for me at the time and and I learned a lot.

7:46 And this is where I kind of started hitting the wall of replacing myself that I was like, okay, I have this thing, but it actually kind of looks a little bit slow and a little bit weird. Like I think I need to kind of find like like not fight this tension with my design education, my industrial design education, but like lean into it and do some you know do some some modeling on my own and kind of make this form look faster make it kind of more commercial like something that consumers are going to be drawn to.

8:14 So I kind of took the underlying model and sleaked it up, tried to make it look fast, tried to make it look like, you know, a desirable object. We’ve we’ve kind of all been, you know, if if you work in design at all, especially for consumer products, you’ve been there. You’re kind trying to think of the consumer. So you can kind of see the development from the early kind of footprint of this to my more sleaked up version trying to keep that mid-foot stability platform and then to the kind of final you know textured version with all the extra details that we put on it.

8:40 That that’s you know there’s a little kernel there of the idea. This is also, you know, you’re always like compromising as you work with other experts who are saying like, “Oh, we need to change this for this reason and and that for that reason.” You’re, you know, trying to keep a little bit of your idea in there. So the mid-foot stability platform survived and the kind of that that cross-section you know, simulation that I was showing you earlier also kind of survived and got us interested in this kind of grooved underfoot cuz I you know, showed these cross-sections and it was like, “Oh, interesting.

9:12 Maybe, you know, maybe we can core this out.” so that also, you know, groovy ride. We we took a lot of foam out of the bottom of this also very wide shoe and it made it even softer and kind of like helped you land on the ground softly. And that did well in testing. So that ended up being part of the final product as well, which you can see a little glamour shot of here.

9:29 And like I said, here’s that original Insight still hanging on there. And I I think it came through pretty well in the final product. And and you you know, you could feel it on the run. I put a lot of miles onto my pair. You know showing some colorways of you know this is kind of the payoff of this first design story. It got to be a trail shoe which was great.

My teammate Louis LeBlanc actually worked on this as well. You know kind of translating it to the trail. We did some cool collaborations with it. District Vision is like a run wellness company that we partner with sometimes. And it got you know in in the little in the little shoe world of like people who are really into performance running shoes. This Believe in the Run blog is pretty big.

10:10 They gave it an award of their best Max cushion shoe of 2022. So again, kind of tying this first story together. I tried already to replace myself. I was like, “Yeah, it’s just just the data is going to design this.” And kind of what I learned along the way was like, “Yeah, I do want the data to design this, but I like it I I couldn’t get to this idea on my own, but the data couldn’t get to like a really human- centered product on its own either.” So there was this like nice creative tension that you know I think you know has been talked about a couple times before up on the stage today and that we’re all familiar with.

10:41 So I learned a lot from that. Didn’t quite manage to replace myself. So maybe spoiling the ending a little bit there. I’ll take you through one more kind of quick story. This one’s a little more recent on the market. Really proud of this work with you know from from me and our team. This is the fuel cell Rebel V4. So this one came from a totally different area.

10:59 We I wasn’t looking at data. We already had some really good fast shoes, you know, good materials, good form, good shape, you know, carbon plates and stuff. We were just looking for a way to kind of like visually represent how do we make this more progressive? How do we stand out from the market? So, again, you know, I’m like, well, I’m I’m an industrial designer. I’m all about those visuals.

11:19 You know, and and getting people’s attention with a beautiful object. But, anyway, so I said, great, I’ll take this on, but maybe again I’ll kind of, you know, take a computational approach to it. So, we’d kind of done some exploration of more smooth, you know, kind of traditional forms, but still trying to be more progressive. And at one point, I just took one of those, threw it into a Grasshopper script that I’d made that kind of chopped it up and made a kind of chiseled planer, like randomized, low poly version of it.

11:47 The team was into it, which was, I don’t know if a surprise, like I was into it, but it’s always nice when someone likes your idea. And, shout out again to Louie. We’ve been at New Balance about, you know, the same amount of time and worked on a lot of things, together. He had this insight when we started developing this aesthetic of saying, “Oh, you know, like we kind of keep the same overall shape, but as you start doing this like generated low poly facet thing, you lose a little bit of volume.” And you know, these are shoes made for running fast and volume equals weight.

12:16 So, you know, maybe that’s a good thing. Like maybe maybe that’s something as we’re pursuing this aesthetic, we can keep that in mind. How do we make that, you know, maybe there’s a functional story there as well that we can use internally or maybe we can tell the consumers. We didn’t end up telling that one to the consumers, but it was kind of helpful and, and driving the internal, you know, like it’s like your north star saying, we want to make these fast, we want to make these edgy, we want to make them light.

12:16 So, you know, kind of tested that out and started, making examples to sell this idea to the team of saying like, look, we have this smoothing, we have this, kind of generated, grasshopper reduction, into a low poly form. And then this is again where that tension came in where it’s like okay we we could just stop at that middle step and just replace you know replace the designers but saying like let’s maybe bring the designers in and use this as a template to give to them and then say keep this in mind keep removing volume as you design like features that are going to look visually cool on the shoe.

So again kind of going back to this like you know we’re exploring the design space data is not as big on this one but you know we’re chasing something aesthetic we’re discovering something functional we’re having a good time you know this is the fun part of design so yeah some more some more kind of selling this to the team honestly all of these like the this is where I learned about how to do pseudo code in my kind of progression as a computational designer of saying I have to explain this now to a lot of people and I there people that I can’t scroll through Grasshopper with and say see you know there just these nodes and components and so you know did a lot of coordinating with various teams because again we’re we’re saying okay we’re going to do this look and we’re going to do it on multiple shoes and it’s going to be a lot of work so we’re going to automate as much of it as we can in Grasshopper and that’s going to kind of give us our logical framework for how we design this aesthetic look and you know hopefully this functional benefit of less weight and then but then we are going to hand this off to designers and we’re going to kind be a coach to them and and again kind of live in this tensiony area between the two.

14:15 So again I I love hate relationship with pseudo code. Sometimes I don’t like to explain my work, I just like to do it. So the the kind of flagship model that we put this on was the Rebel. The Rebel V3 had done really well. The Rebel V2 had done really well. This is kind of our fast training shoe. So again we you know put it through this process of saying okay let’s get the generated low poly output and then let’s explore that creative tension.

14:41 You know, let’s let’s replace parts of ourselves, but let’s keep, you know, those those really important human parts. So you know I felt conflicted a lot during this that I wanted to kind of break it down and say you know I I wanted to kind of build the blackbox again for making the decision and say okay and say oh you know like maybe I can just quantify like quantify this decision-m process of how much do we balance that like the designer’s intuition of what they want to do with the model and like the the computational output that we’re giving them of saying like oh yeah this this is already reducing the volume keep as much of this as possible and in the end I kind of realized that you know not a again I’m learning so not a not an original realization but I was like oh this is kind of what humans are always doing like even 7,000 years BCE like you’re going between like do I stencil my hand on the cave wall like that’s really data you know like that’s like the real world or do I do something really stylized where I have cool elongated limbs and you know like a a you know that’s like connected to our spirituality and our deities and I have like a cool animal head.

17:13 So, you know, I I I I’ve kind of appreciated being like, “Oh, we’re we’re stuck between here again, and it’s okay. We’re going to end up somewhere in the middle.” And that’s maybe kind of the beauty of like all these computational processes. So, in the end, this kind of became like my personal totem for this project of saying Clovis points, you know, like we’re taking something smooth, we’re removing volume to make something that’s really cutting edge.

18:09 And you know whether you’re kind of doing that process with hand tools or doing it with Grasshopper like that’s a really human process. So we’ll kind of give the payoff of this story. This was here’s the glamour render of how the tooling came out. The you know people are really happy with the shoe. We didn’t quite reduce the volume because we decided the team decided to make the shoe a little bit taller and a little bit wider to kind of get more people into it.

Make it a little more democratic. But overall I think that you know again the aesthetic result was I way beyond what we could have imagined and really set us apart in the marketplace. This process ended up working with the design team to apply it across multiple shoes. That’s like our marathon racer there in the center in gray. Some training shoes and you know really great these did really great in market and also like had a great kind of use case with the athletes that we’re lucky enough to sponsor.

So this is 2024 in Paris. Alex E of Great Britain got to wear these in his gold medal triathlon race. So, you know, we’ll we’ll try. There’s so many people, you know, all of our jobs, it’s like so many people and so much expertise goes into it. So, I like to think that it’s like there’s a little particle of me like running on the road out there, but it’s you know, it’s with all the other particles of it’s mostly Alex and then, you know, and then the material engineers and stuff, but we’re along for the ride.

You know, this is why we do stuff. We we make we make cool stuff to make humans lives better. So in the end, you know, I’ve kind of spoiled along the way. Didn’t quite replace myself, but I definitely replaced the you know, the career I thought I was going to have with something that for me has been a lot more rewarding and interesting. Mostly and this is kind of what informs my work now going forward.

You know, maybe maybe later, you know, if I ever get a chance to talk to you again, I’ll say, “Oh, here’s, you know, here’s the stuff I was working on right now that I can’t show yet.” But I’ve kept working in this way of exploring that tension of saying like okay like the computational process like one I design it but then it helps me discover things and you know for me that’s parametric design more often than you know AI but maybe in the future it’ll be AI and it you know it kind of pulls me this way and then I push it that way and I think you know I think tension’s good in in our jobs.

So yeah that’s that’s kind of my philosophy right now. I’ll let you know if it changes. Happy to talk with anyone afterwards about footwear. We have a great New Balance team here too if you want to hang out with them and and talk footwear as well. So thank you. To see the full recording of this and previous presentations as well as information about future CDFAM events, visit CDFAM.com.