Spiritual Lure
Material portfolio for future footwear, 2018+2023
Shoe mock-ups from the samples, 2023.
Lenticular lens samples in different colourways for heel and toe part.
Spiritual Lure is a colour and material portfolio made for footwear. It includes a tailored colour concept, hand-woven jacquard pieces and casted silicone samples, which react to motion. These pieces are made for the ankle and heel parts of a shoe. The project was part of master degree studies at Aalto University.
The self-set design task was to research how spirituality resonates in materials and objects and how it could be translated into shoe materials. The concept of spirituality was based on a 19 year-old real-life target person, a representative for generation Z. An interview with her formed into an interesting customer profile, which steered the whole project further:
"A digital native, who studies the world through easy-going and ironic, but spiritual filter. Her friends are her tribe and she's hungry for mind-triggering, stimulating new experiences. She is a tourist on a wanderlust for ironic spirituality."
The project developed into creating a customer profile inspired colour board and sketching different kinds of eye-triggering footwear materials, which react to dancing, raving or running with friends. The spirituality in this particular context translated into an entity, which was described with expressions such as visual noise, visual depth, resonation, rhythm, self-transcendent and tactility.
The woven samples were woven in two different colourways combining silicone tubes and nylon strings. When bend the dynamic waffle weave structure changes color.
The lenticular effect visualized. These experimental casted silicone samples function as lenticular lenses when bonded with specifically printed fabric. Lenses are engineered to display an optical motif, which changes when the lens is watched from different angles or moved on top of the printed fabric.
Project’s design concept “spiritual filter” visualized. The pictures, excluding the personal photograph top center, are retrieved from Pinterest and manipulated afterwards.