Bread && Butter 2018
One customised shoe per visitor, in under seven minutes, with no CAD operator
House of Vans wanted visitors to design and take away a personalised shoe within the dwell time of a busy trade-fair floor — with no queue, no operators trained in CAD, and no unusable output.
I built a Grasshopper definition exposed through hardware instead of a screen. A custom Arduino MIDI controller drives scale, rotation and distortion of pattern templates in real time, and the definition holds the constraints, so nothing a visitor makes is unengraveable.
The real constraint was throughput
Design intent had to survive the handoff to fabrication every time. Arrival to finished shoe in under seven minutes, no failed burns, no specialist at the controls.
That reframes the problem. The interesting work isn’t the generative pattern — it’s the boundary. Every state a visitor can reach has to stay inside what a laser can cut on a curved textile upper, and it has to stay inside Vans’ visual language.
Parametric Control System
Analog signals from knobs, buttons and a joystick stream into Grasshopper through Arduino and Firefly. A mapping layer normalises raw hardware input into controlled ranges governing pattern density, scale, orientation and graphic variation.
Abstracting complex parametric controls into physical inputs is what made a live computational model usable by anyone who walked up.
Interaction Hardware
I designed and prototyped the MIDI controller so visitors manipulate geometry by hand rather than through a menu. The interface is the thing that makes the system usable — tactile, playful, immediate, and impossible to break.
Design System
Five template families — topographic contours, radial bursts, illustrative sets, chevrons, icon packs — each parametrically generated and driven by the same three controls. The variety is deliberate; the boundary is not.
Outcome
The installation created a seamless pipeline connecting user interaction, generative design, and digital manufacturing. By exposing the design process to participants, the system transformed product customization into a collaborative and experiential design activity.
