Warm Up with These Shoe Hacks By Integrated Product Design Students

PennDesign Integrated Product Design Lecturer Carla Diana kicked off the Spring 2016 semester with a 2-week project in which students "hit the ground running" with creative technology by hacking a sneaker. Produced for Diana's course Design of Contemporary Products: Smart Objects (IPD528/ARCH728), students' designs addressed everything from interactive entertainment to fitness and personal safety. There's a game controller, a "Call for Help" alarm that syncs with a mobile phone, and a running shoe that tells you when it's time for a new pair.

Diana explains, "It's intended to give students hands-on experience with electronics prototyping using sensors inputs like light levels, buttons and movement and translating them to outputs like sound and LEDs. I love seeing students who have never used Arduino get excited about the possibilities, and it builds the confidence that they'll need later on in the semester when they work on more sophisticated design projects."

For the assignment, each team of two or three students was given a LilyPad Arduino, a special version of the popular prototyping platform that can use sewn conductive thread instead of wires. They use a shoe (in this case, a sneaker or slipper) as the base for realizing their concepts.

"Using a shoe forces them to think of real life scenarios and take into account the value of human gesture in interaction," says Diana.

Student teams were: Cynthia Anastasiou and Sarah Schechter (Call for Help Shoe); Phillip Chang and Sabrina Li (Theramin Shoe); Aditi Dugar and Jin Jieming (Runners Wear Alert Shoe); Stephanie Lopez Hayna, Lu Liu, and Yu Zhou (Simon Game Shoe); and Gary Polk, Jessica Soe and Yilang Peng (KO Game Controller Shoe).