The Futures Archive S1E10: The Shoe

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Transcript

Lee Moreau
Welcome to The Futures Archive, a show about human centered design, where this season— we'll take an object, look for the human at the center and keep asking questions. I'm Lee Moreau.

Garnette Cadogan
And I'm Garnette Cadogan.

Lee Moreau
On each episode we're going to start with an object today. That object is the shoe. We'll look at the history of that object from our perspective as designers who've done work in human centered design. Not just how it looks and feels, but also the relationship between that object and the people it was designed for...

Garnette Cadogan
...and with other humans too.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic. Later on, we'll hear from a member of Automatic's Design Counsel, Kelly Hoffman. The Futures Archive's education partner, this season, is Adobe.

Lee Moreau
Garnette, Thank you so much for being here today. It's great to have you on the show.

Garnette Cadogan
Oh, it's wonderful. We get to talk about an addiction I have and justify it as intellectual discussion.

Lee Moreau
That's an addiction to shoes?

Garnette Cadogan
To shoes. And to walking.

Lee Moreau
It'd be great before we get started if you could kind of introduce yourself and then we can talk a little bit more about walking. So tell listeners who you are and what you're doing right now professionally.

Garnette Cadogan
Who I am is a walker. A wanderer. Someone who loves taking in and absorbing and encountering the world on foot. Professionally, I am the Tunney Lee distinguished lecture of urbanism at M.I.T. and a senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale School of Art. But really and truly, I am a wanderer.

Lee Moreau
So I remember the first time I met you. We were talking about walking, and I described a project that I had done like, I don't know, 20 years ago where I was in Houston and I was taking the public transit as far as it would go, and I was walking home and just talking about being in that space and sort of discovery and really looking at cities and environments in wholly new ways. And then, of course, you revealed your experiences with walking, which were completely transformative for me to to understand. So most people, if I ask a simple question like, where do you walk, they'd have a relatively simple answer, but I'm dying to hear your answer: Where do you walk?

Garnette Cadogan
Wherever it would have me. And so I love walking in cities more than anywhere else because of how cities feel like it's a dense compression of stories. And so cities are the place in which I find walking most beguiling, most compelling. And also in where I am most guaranteed to keep encountering stories that will surprise me, stories that regall me, stories that will elicit my own stories and it becomes a wonderful swap of stories. I think of walking as kind of, you know, just the bookswaps in the neighborhood in which you take a look and leave a book— walking for me is a way of taking a story and leaving a story. I'm actually a part of a group that goes walking every weekend in Boston, and we try to. Every week we're exploring a different neighborhood. And often the walks are anything from eight to, you know, maybe even as much as 12 hours and just exploring in Boston in all its variety neighborhood after neighborhood meeting stranger after stranger, depending on the kindness of strangers to open up the city to us and to tell us so much more, and so it's more than a landscape, becomes a social world, a cultural world, with so many stories and experiences,

Lee Moreau
I love that. And I can't wait to hear more of these stories in this episode. But first, I want to talk a little bit more about shoes. So first off, like what is your what is your favorite pair of shoes?

Garnette Cadogan
Oh, of course. Clarks Desert Boots. Committed. If I were a tattoo person, that's the tattoo I would have on my shoulder. Clarks Desert Boot. I have worn down many a Clarks.

Lee Moreau
So for our listeners who don't know. Describe the Desert Boot. What does it look like?

Garnette Cadogan
You know, you know it. It's ankle high. It's generally leather, you know, suede and it's generally two pairs of islets, three, at most and generally leather are rubber sort, and I love the rubber soles, which in Jamaica were called cheesy bottoms.

Lee Moreau
So where does this affinity to Clarks come from?

Garnette Cadogan
Part of it, it comes from being Jamaican. A matter of fact, if you're in an American city, if you're in New York and you want to know the Jamaican neighborhood, don't go searching for the Jamaican food or searching for Jamaican music or listening for Jamaican accents— you know, walk into neighborhoods and keep your head to the ground, and when you start seeing a high frequency of Clarks shoes, it's very likely you're at a Jamaican neighborhood. A matter of fact, there are hundreds of Jamaican songs that talk about Clarks shoes. And so growing up in Jamaica, you can't help but see Clarks as the cool shoes. It's a marker of cool, but more than that, many people that wear Clarks think it's in a dependable, reliable shoe that can endure in a many a condition. But also for me because it has a kind of down to earthness, you don't have to be precious about your Clarks Desert Boot, can just run it to the ground and it still looks quite good. You know, being beat up a little.

Lee Moreau
So you've talked about identity related to Clarks, you've talked about utility and function. We're going to talk a lot more about all of these topics. But first, we want to talk to some experts and historians about the shoe as a as a cultural object and as a design object.

Elizabeth Semmelhack
I would argue that from the beginning shoes did more than simply protect our feet.

Lee Moreau
Elizabeth Semmelhack is the creative director and senior curator of the Bata Shoe Museum.

Elizabeth Semmelhack
The oldest shoe in our collection is four thousand five hundred years old, and it is a pair of funerary shoes from ancient Egypt. And so they're wooden. They were never intended to be worn in life, but they were intended to be available to the dead so that they would have footwear in the afterlife.

Garnette Cadogan
And I've been to a few funerals in Jamaica in which a person has been buried in thier Clarks, I said— you have to bury this person in Clarks. That's how they want to be in the afterlife. And what I always think of shoes being something that you wear down to the afterlife. I know people in Jamaica that when their Clarks shoes are worn down, they actually have a funeral and bury the shoe.

Lee Moreau
What!

Garnette Cadogan
I kid you not. There are people who bury their shoes, who have a funeral— I know at least two people who had funerals for their Clarks shoes. So I think of in-a yes, wearing the shoes into the afterlife but I also think of some people treating their shoes with such veneration, is that the shoe itself had an afterlife.

Lee Moreau
Yeah, exactly. The shoes have their own afterlife. So shoes have a long development history, and they've been used in many ways, both the sort of functional and ceremonial so many different contexts of the use of shoes in our culture. And through that ann evolution of design has also happened, right? So we're designing for different functions, different attributes— we're designing to be buried in our shoes. Let's hear a bit more from Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Semmelhack
And so no matter where you look throughout history around the world, there have been different types of footwear to answer different types of needs. So it's not as though the same group of people started out with a simple sandal and now have a very complicated form of footwear. It's not an easy question to answer. There is no straight progression.

Garnette Cadogan
One of the things about shoes is how much it's a mark and not merely of, who are but also where we are. Are we home, are we at work, are we among friends, are among people who are trying to impress, are we among people who we have no need to impress them? And so shoes itself is a mark of no to how we would like to be seen, but how we see. How all of that is tied up in just the simple thing that we put on our feet not merely for protection, but also for projection in this. Protection from the elements, but a projection of who we are and who we would like to be. So the shoe that you wear to interview— yes, it's protection, but it's also a projection of know who you would like your future employer to think you are, but also a projection of what you would like to be doing with your life or how you'd like to be earning a living. And so the shoes itself, as in a bold, future oriented, but also in many ways, heartening to the past.

Lee Moreau
I love that. It's such a beautiful notion that protection and projection. Let's talk to someone who's also thinking about that in the current times, who's really had something to do with shoes from right now from this century

Kevin Bethune
In terms of the process of designing a shoe at Nike and let alone the Jordan brand category, there are many hands that contribute to the design of a shoe.

Lee Moreau
Kevin Bethune is the founder and chief creative officer of Dreams Design + Life, a think tank for designing innovation. He's a good friend of The Futures Archive, and he worked for Nike on the team that designed the Air Jordan Fusion Eight.

Kevin Bethune
The act of designing footwear against a human foot— one of the toughest morphologies that you could ever want to design against because, you know, a foot is dynamic. It's moving, it's sensorial. It's alive.

Garnette Cadogan
I was thinking about also, I was thinking about a last, how you make a last for a shoe. And just the difficulty of making the last and making a last that's just right.

Lee Moreau
And for our listeners, the last is the sort of armature, the kind of often like wooden or solid armature that is the the basis for the shoe. It's kind of model of the foot that you designed this shoe around, right?

Garnette Cadogan
Yeah. A lot of shoe designers would say: the last is first. It is the first thing used to make the shoe because it determines the shape of the a shoe, the internal shape up the shoe. So as you start designing for feet in many ways, you start designing for a foot and start thinking of, you know, how to foot itself is this complicated mechanism. And so the simple thing that-that propels us, that propulsion that comes from in our foot is something that is actually making a million calculations in each second. And even if we're not walking, you know, for those who are, you know, grounded because of injuries or disabilities, you know also making shoes for them is still a complicated matter to make something that's comfortable to make something that dovetails around the feet, something that, as it were in-a in-a snugs the feet— is an engineering feat and an artistic feat.

Lee Moreau
It's easy to take for granted how complex the circumstances are in your footwear, but what the shoe does, the kind of complex forces, the dynamics that are taking place, the constant transition. It's it's kind of mind boggling when you think about it, it's such a simple thing at the same time. What is the relationship between the complexity in footwear and the complexity in walking? We walk in different ways, too, depending both what we're wearing, where we are.

Garnette Cadogan
Yeah, and walk in many ways. We think of walking as getting us somewhere, but walking is also stopping us in that gravity is the too friendly friend, who's always trying to grab us and hugs all too tightly. As so in designing a shoe, you're also thinking about, you know what it means to actually have something that's creating support as you're breaking a fall. So the act of walking, walking itself is this complicated thing in which, you know, one foot in front of the other is yes to get you in along a pathway. But it's also to stop the path of, you know, you slam into the ground, so it's breaking your fall.

Lee Moreau
That's so beautiful. I mean, you're basically talking about a struggle with gravity.

Garnette Cadogan
Yes.

Lee Moreau
That's an ongoing process, right, it's incredible. Let's hear again from Kevin and his experience at Nike.

Kevin Bethune
The notion of like ancestral shoes sort of comes up or or some designer will go into history books and bring up something that was like woven from thousands of years ago that they unearthed in a fossil or some, you know, archeological dig site. And the team was inspired by how that was constructed and that finds its way to a modern interpretation. So, you know, I think, shoes are an essential element that allows us to navigate the world.

Garnette Cadogan
And it's so crucial to think about what it means to navigate the world. What does it mean to encounter, to encounter others, to encounter our self in others? What does it mean to think about the world as one of, as experiential? And so I just never think of shoes as merely tools that they're these wonderful gifts that allow me, but allow us to keep navigating, to bump into the surprise party to turn a corner, say in New Orleans and see a brass band making its way down the street. It's what actually allows you to go and from borough to borough to borough in New York City and seeing New York City, in all its variety and its complexity and its promise and its frustrations. It's what allows me to in a head to Berlin and to decide— Oh, I'm just going to walk for 24 hours without stopping and just seeing Berlin in all its wide variety and meeting people, and so here is a shoe taking us into so many different experiences, so many different places. And, as it were, it becomes this door. This portal, this wormhole into so many other worlds, other moods in other thoughts. In other words, the shoe becomes an important tool for connectedness to our cities, to ourselves, to our cultural worlds, to our natural worlds, and so to walk is to find a path is to find a path of meanings, is to find a path to other people, is this wonderful movement towards others in-or towards a richer self and shoes does that, shoes is what allows that to happen you know with so much less pain and so much less friction and so much less nuisance than it otherwise would.

Lee Moreau
So we're talking about how humans take shoes from designers, right? So they they kind of are the recipients of of the footwear of the shoes. But do designers actually think about which humans will take them and what they're going to do with those shoes? Let's hear from Kevin again.

Kevin Bethune
Yeah, we can't always assume what the customer will do. Ultimately, the customer decides if we had an idea in mind for a particular shoe, for a given target customer, someone else may actually buy the shoe and they're going to live their life with that shoe, right? And we should in some way celebrate that. I think ultimately, though, and I'm speaking from my experience at Nike, there definitely was a bias in leaning toward always starting with the athlete insight first, like what is truly the the athlete's need, wants, inhibitors, motivations.

Lee Moreau
And this gets us into the question of the user— who is the user of the shoe, who's the recipient, what are they doing with it, whether they're taking 24 hour walks or trying to play basketball. This is always been a question about shoes from the very beginning.

Garnette Cadogan
Yeah. And I think also about what it might mean to think about shoes that are more universal. Thinking about not first the athlete, but as it were, a commonplace walker. And to think more broadly for that commonplace walker, being, you know, who's you know, who's our default walker? And in-a how could not thinking more broadly who the default walker might be may enact a power structure that we don't want. That is everything the shoes are supposed to undo that sometimes a shoe can actually reinforce.

Lee Moreau
Mmhm. There's a real tension there between designing a sort of universal sense of design, but then also the identity function of a— particularly in footwear, right? So it's like we want them to express specific things, but we also want them in a perfect world to really be accessible to all. So we're I feel like we're constantly struggling with that.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic, which is building a new web, and a new workplace all around the world.

Kelly Hoffman
I'm Kelly Hoffman, at Automattic I'm the design lead for dot org. I am on the Design Council.

Lee Moreau
Kelly joined Automattic eight years ago.

Kelly Hoffman
When I first joined Automattic, we were- we were pretty small and there was not a lot of emphasis on leadership or hierarchy or the right and only way to do things. And our design culture has grown from that. As we bring new people in, they bring their experience in with them. And I'm personally excited or proud that we have kept that and that each team and each individual can sort of bring their design process to the table. And we don't really worry about the one way to do things as long as the user can get what they need done, done. That's all that matters at the end of the day.

Lee Moreau
For Kelly, joining Automattic meant a new design challenge.

Kelly Hoffman
Automattic is the place where you can choose your own adventure and really never stop learning.

Lee Moreau
Designing a better web. Join us at Automattic dot com slash design. That's auto-m-a-double t-i-c dot com slash design.

Lee Moreau
When we put so much importance into something like a shoe, right, as a as a cultural artifact, an identity building artifact piece of our wardrobe status symbol even, what does that mean? What is it? How do you define identity when we're thinking about the world in those terms?

Garnette Cadogan
So often we think of identity in-as a representation. You know, how we would like to be seen, how we understand ourselves, particular in the context of affinity. How we see ourselves in the context of others who we think have affinity with us.

Alexandra Sherlock
I prefer to look at it less as what do my shoes say about me and more, how do you use shoes to identify who we're similar and different to?

Lee Moreau
Alexandra Sherlock is an academic researcher in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University and founder of the Footwear Research Network.

Alexandra Sherlock
So identity, from a sociological perspective, relies quite heavily on us identifying who we think we are similar and different to. And shoes are a really interesting way to quickly assess that. So we might look at someone's shoes and say: Oh, I like that brand. I understand that brand that someone who I might identify with, that someone who I might align myself with or want to be like. Equally, we might look at a pair of shoes and think: Oh, look at the state of their shoes that someone that I don't identify with.

Lee Moreau
For me, it's a sort of my connection to shoes and what they're helping me communicate and what I'm starting to identify with and sort of projecting. And I love that notion of that protection and projection that you brought up earlier. What I'm trying to project, I think, probably goes back to some working class roots and sort of origins that I want to maintain, but also maybe run away from no pun intended. But how should we think about this as we're constructing our identities Garnette, and you talked about your affinity with Clarks, but just more broadly?

Garnette Cadogan
It points to who we think we are and who we would like to be with. But it also is a way of saying who we are not. And I think that's one things that I love about, say, Converse that it feels so accessible. That you don't have to drop a month's paycheck to to buy a pair of Converse. You know, you could pick up a pair of Converse in the US for somewhere in the thirties. It has a lot more of the scent of accessibility. You know, verses the scent from the John Lobb shoe, is something that makes me want to squint up my nose and hold my nose because of the people who are wearing it that I've encountered that in-a are reeking, you know, with the snobbery and class obnoxiousness that I very much am trying to get away from in walking. Because in walking, I'm trying to encounter the world in all its multiplicites. So I'm not thinking on it to encounter the world in a working class and in poorer classes. I also encounter people who are wealthy and to hear their stories and enrich their experiences the way I am enriched by expierences from people from the working class.

Lee Moreau
What I'm hearing is, yes, you want to meet all of these different people, but you don't necessarily want to wear their shoes.

Garnette Cadogan
Yes. Which is also something that exposes a disconnect. I don't understand in-a shoes as collection. And I know that there's a whole world of like in-a sneaker collector culture. But I think you buy shoes to wear them. And some people might argue that actually there is in-a class of shoes that actually be designed now really to be collected and less to be worn. It's something that in that once confounds and frustrates me.

Lee Moreau
I mean, this is a central issue in design, right? Are we focused on form and beauty issues of beauty and form and expression and image, or are we focused on issues like function and utility? And really design should be a fusion of those two things. But the users of those objects later on can do what they want. And some I'm sure there are some people that buy Clarks because they find them functional. They find that there's a lot of utility. They work really well. But other people clear their buying Clarks because of the image they project. And I think same could be said for most athletic shoes like like the Nikes that Kevin was talking about before. Clearly, some people are using them to play basketball, but there's a whole host of other people that are using them both as a monetary instrument or for the image that they project and communicate about themselves.

Garnette Cadogan
Yeah.

Lee Moreau
I have a surprise for you. We were doing our research for this episode, and Alexander Sherlock, who you just heard from, is an expert in Clarks, and I want you to hear a little bit more from her on this topic. She shared with us what one participant of our research said about Clarks, and I think you'll find this interesting.

Alexandra Sherlock
He said if the Desert Boot could speak, it would speak patois, not English. So it was, you know, yes, these are made in the UK. Yes, it's a UK brand and has been for time in memoriam, but it's a Jamaican shoe. Then he was unequivocal about that.

Lee Moreau
This is really important to the to all design, but to the future of shoe design, certainly. And also, as we think about how design impacts identity, right? So there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between the designer and ultimately the wearer or the wearers and the users of that design object later on. There's no better example, I think, than the way that shoes are being defined by the u-the ultimate users.

Garnette Cadogan
And I think, for example, you know, there is the nod that you've often heard of the nod in-a Black people, in a context practically in which a feel that they're the minority are in a way, or they feel that their identity, their dignity is not honored or affirmed in our respected, we would often give each other the nod, a way of acknowledging each other, sort of saying: I see you. And it's like an upward nod in-a the chin in-a raised up. And in many ways, I think of Clarks on my foot as a kind of nod. A kind of nod with a feet, when I pas d other people with Clarks, particularly being away from Jamaica. Half of my life I've spent living in the U.S.. And so it's a way of at once being elsewhere while being here, a way of holding on to home in-as it were. And so to walk sometimes walking can be a minefield, depending on the neighborhood I'm in, in which people are assuming that I'm up to no good because of my skin color, that to wear Clarks is to sometimes a way of asserting, you know, my identity in the midst of sometimes I feel like I have to make sartorial adjustments just to appear non-criminal to others. And the Clarks are a way of saying I still have on the rude boy shoes. You don't know it's a rude boy shoes, but I know it's a rude boy shoes. And it's still a kind of rebellion, even though you can't see the rebellion. You know, but my own silent rebellion that gets me in-a sense of in-a mischievous satisfaction.

Lee Moreau
This reminds me of the project that I talked about earlier and walking in Houston. And, you know, as a white male, probably in my late 20s when I did that, I remember getting picked up by a police officer. I was probably trespassing somewhere near the Houston ship channel, which is a pretty secure area. And I was picked up by a police officer and escorted over a bridge to the other side. Very nice. It strikes me that — you're smiling, like, what a crazy story that is, because that probably wouldn't have happened to most people. It probably wouldn't have happened to you. And you talk about this in your article, "Walking While Black" and all the various tensions and events that you encountered along the way.

Garnette Cadogan
It reminds me of you know one of those stories that it feels too good to be true, but it's also too good to check to fact check. And I remember in-a hearing multiple times and reading, and I think the stories in Al Fingers's "Clarks in Jamiaca"—of the police were in search of some criminals and came to dance hall, a public concert in Jamaica and said everybody with Clarks stand against the wall, everybody else, you can go home because Clarks were so associated with criminality. And then actually they found a bunch of shoes just on the ground and people were leaving barefoot just because they didn't want to be associated with the criminals. But then also thought of what it meant to come to the US and in different neighborhoods in it, being Black and walking through. And time and again, the police would stop me thinking that I was a criminal because somebody would call because they saw a suspicious black man walk in which too often meant they saw a black men walking in their neighborhood. And how suddenly having, you know, in a different sartorial markers that's, you know, that screams safety, in added effect. So I remember I first started buying Converse shoes in sort of an attempt to say: Look, you know, in in am the safe, all-American black man walking through your neighborhood. No need to call the cops. So also funny enough that I began to think of shoes as protection, not protection from the elements in-a rain, dust, in-a pebble— but I thought of shoes as a protection from harassment, protection from the police in assuming that there was a criminal or to people who would call assuming I was a criminal that in my in my first impressions to the police, the one that would suggest in-a safety, law abiding non-criminal. And so the shoes became part of in-a whole costuming that, yes, you know, we all wear clothes or all our clothes, are costumes, a way of saying this is who we want to be seen as in the world, or this is who we don't want to be seen as in the world, but it's still a costume. But there are times in which it became an armor. It moved from being a costume to an armor. So for me- and so I'd always spent time thinking about what shoe moment to choose, what shoe would be good armor for walking through this neighborhood that is once comfortable, but also if I get stopped by the cops and first place they look is my feet, they'll see something that suggest safety, or that suggest in-a that I'm not a criminal, you know, that's something that suggest, oh, he's an all-American uniform, moving through this neighborhood, just exploring and trying to be out in the world exploring it on foot.

Lee Moreau
I mean, echoing what you said earlier. No better designed object, I think combines the notions of protection and projection the way that the shoe does.

Lee Moreau
All right, now we'll do a little walking ourselves. As you know, every episode of The Futures Archive ends with a prompt, a sort of a design exercise for you, the listener, to keep working on the object and the ideas that we've talked about in this week's show. You'll be able to share your ideas and see what other listeners are thinking about, too, and I'll tell you where to do that in just a bit. This week, we'd like you to travel 15 or 30 minutes to a place that you've always been curious about, but you've never been to before. Walk around and observe— not just what you see and hear, use all of your senses. Do you feel excited? Uncertain? Uncomfortable? Are you lost? Should you go left or right? How are the people that live here the same as you? And how are they different? How are you different just by being in this place? Please post a single photo that best represents your experience and a brief description on Instagram with the hashtag The Futures Archive, that's all one word. You can read the full prompt on our Instagram at Design Observer.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is a podcast from Design Observer to keep up with the show go to TFA dot Design Observer dot com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or whatever you listen to podcasts. And if you liked what you heard today, please make sure to rate and review us and share this with your friends. Garnette, thank you so much for being with us today. This was an amazing conversation. I know that I want to direct people to read your article "Walking While Black" first and foremost. But if there's any listeners who want to learn more about you or find out more information, where can they go?

Garnette Cadogan
They can find me on the MIT website at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning webpage and up there, with a few articles and a few interests posted alongside my faculty page. I know I should be one of those people who should have a website, and I have been threatened and warned and begged and cajoled by friends and colleagues and editors. It will happen eventually, eventually.

Lee Moreau
I can assure you that there are several people listening to this podcast who design websites and are going to contact you, so, you could be sure of that.

Lee Moreau
Please post your answers for this week's assignment on Instagram using the hashtag The Futures Archive, that's all one word. We're really excited to see what you come up with, where you've been, how you're feeling, and make sure you're following us at Design Observer on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The Future's Archives education partner is Adobe. For each episode, you can find supporting materials, including further reading, lesson plans and all kinds of activities suitable for college level learners. For more about Adobe's educational initiatives, follow them at EDEX dot adobe dot com. And The Futures Archive is brought to you by Automattic. Thanks again to Elizabeth Semmelhack, Kevin Bethune, and Alexandra Sherlock for talking to The Futures Archive. You can find out more about them and my co-host Garnette Cadogan in our show notes at TFA dot Design Observer dot com, as well as a full transcription of our show. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. Owen Agnew edits the show. Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo help to develop the show. Thanks, as always to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand and to Design Observer executive producer Betsy Vardell.