Damage
DAMAGE
Shoes for a post traumatic future
The DAMAGE capsule collection of post-prosthetics speculates footwear for an oncoming world, employing passive, bio, non-electric technology.
INDUSTRY posed the Air MAG as a nexus that introduced a future to a generation of young influential children of the nuclear 80’s. This shoe, self tightening, illuminated, seamless, suggested a new world of footwear - automatic, electric, visually slick & intuitively void of the need to touch.
30 years on this technology has been surpassed, however the MAG provides a unique framework for visionary thinking - it plants a seed in the scorched earth & says “what next?”
In each of these concepts we take the body as the starting point & use it as a frame of reference to extend the functions already present.
VENICE_HEEL - HI/Lo Tide looks at the swelling floods of Venice, & imagines a shoe for walking in deep water.
PHASE_CHANGE presents a passive cooling vascular system that chills the body without any energy use.
Un_BALANCED addresses the ageing populations terminal balance problems.
The digital art is held as NFT works on the FOUNDATION.APP platform.
Photography by Marinó Thorlacius
Venice Heel | Hi_Tide
Venice, New-Atlantis, the last water city.
We watched in awe as the tides rose with increasing regularity. As the planet heated, we learned that not only did the polar caps melt, but warmer water actually expanded. The oceans rose at twice the rate we anticipated and now any coastal inhabited areas flood often. Sometimes the tide goes out—and sometimes it is permanent. We named it The Swell.
Venice Heel | Lo_Tide
Venice, New-Atlantis, the last water city.
And as such, newer shoes were developed. Prosthetics for the water. The Hi-Tide and Lo-Tide prosthetics, VENICE HEEL slang, were a simple solution to an unsolvable problem. Part keel, part stilt, we wade directionless through the flowing swollen global waters. Step by strangely keeling step.
The VENICE HEEL for HI/LO Tide fit over the wearers current shoe and allow the user to navigate the hi or low flow of city street water.
PHASE_CHANGE
America, the leisure lands.
It occurred to those in the hills of San Francisco that the women were colder, the men were warmer and significant energy was being spent on balancing unbalanced internal environments for the permanent worker or home dweller.
Heating systems, cooling systems—the application of power to regulate the temperature was astronomical. Cooling things inside, made the planet hotter outside. We pushed this beyond the point of no return, knowingly, just because we were uncomfortable.
If we could cool the body in some way, individually, change the experience of temperature, rather than change large cubic volumes of unused environments, perhaps we could curb the catastrophe. So much power was being used for this that it would be an incredible amount of planetary strain lifted if just some cities could reduce their use.
Watching the elephants and the rabbits inspired a new breed of footwear that cooled the body through the large capillary skin areas. The ears of these animals had very large veins that when the blood rant through it, it would cool down in its exposure to the air, like a radiator, and then go back into the body colder. This would actively cool the body in both physiological and experiential ways. And humans had the same types of large blood vessel skin areas in the area under their eyes, the palms of their hands... and the soles of their feet.
We conceived that a body heat powered cooling prosthetic could generate blood cooling from something in the shoe. This was achieved by inventing a phase change substance that was liquid below 35 degrees C, and a gas above it. By running a series of flexible pipes under the hot footbed, the body heat would turn the fluid to a gas, which would then rise and flow into tubes on the outside of the shoe, thereby cooling outside the body. It would then flow back down again to the footbed as a cold fluid, ready to continue the cycle, like an organism’s circulatory system.
Un_BALANCED
Iceland, the volcanic desert.
Life extension therapy may have finally become cheap and accessible but it still came at a cost. We continued to look great on the outside with our smoothed skin, filled-in hairlines and geriatric leathered abs. We managed to replace lungs, hearts and eyes, but we faltered at the final frontier—we could never rejuvenate those fatigued veins.
Pumping the blood was no problem, but getting it everywhere was still a challenge. Replacing a system, even upgrading it was too delicate and too small to achieve an aftermarket fit out for endlessly pumping that thick red fluid around.
Throughout human history, as the older generations aged, they lost mobility through a sensitivity drop in their hands and feet. Now was no different, we could engineer ourselves to look good and feel good, but, short of a total vascular overhaul, we would still be losing our balance. The number one cause of death in the elderly to this day happens from what we call “terminal balance disorder.” Some mobile prune falls over because of the insensitivity in their feet. They become bed ridden while healing, a clot forms, moves around the body and ka-pow. “Knock-knock," from the Reaper.
And now, the biggest fear among our undying ancestors is a simple case of losing balance and falling over.
The solution came with a sensory prosthetic: a shoe that counter-intuitively created a balance regulation in the brain through presenting the illusion of instability. The trick was found when we noticed that walking on unstable surfaces—like rocky ground, loose pebbled areas or sand—that when the body registered the uneven surface, the brain would create an automatic switch to re-regulate the body, like a gyro. A hologram of stability.
DAMAGE - Footwear for a Post Traumatic Future features three different designs brought to life through a combination of 3D printing and painstakingly finished by hand.
This project is developed in partnership with INDUSTRY, a minority-led creative consultancy based in Portland, Oregon, with whom the NFT set is minted.