Bread && Butter 2018
The goal of the project was to design and deploy a real-time shoe customization experience that allowed users to interactively personalize Vans footwear during a live event environment.
I developed an interactive customization system that enabled attendees to personalise their Vans shoes in real time. The installation combined computational design, physical computing, and digital fabrication workflows to create a seamless bridge between physical interaction and digital design.
Visitors could manipulate design parameters through a tactile interface, instantly generating customized parametric patterns. The system translated user input into dynamic geometry updates, allowing participants to explore personalized configurations while maintaining production-ready design constraints.
To ensure smooth performance in a public event setting, the system was developed through rapid prototyping and iterative testing, optimizing responsiveness, stability, and usability under continuous use.
The result was an experience that transformed footwear customization into an interactive design process, giving users direct agency in shaping the final product.
Design System
The platform included a collection of parametrically generated templates that could be modified through parametric controls. These ranged from geometric patterns and topographic lines to graphic icon sets and abstract illustrations, enabling a wide range of visual outcomes while maintaining fabrication constraints.
Parametric Control System
The customization system was driven by a Grasshopper definition connected to a custom MIDI controller through Arduino and the Firefly plugin. Analog signals from knobs, buttons, and a joystick were streamed into Grasshopper, where they were normalized and mapped to meaningful design parameters.
This mapping layer translated raw hardware input into controlled ranges that governed pattern density, scale, orientation, and graphic variation in the generative design system. By abstracting complex parametric controls into simple physical inputs, participants could interact with a live computational design model in an intuitive and responsive way.
Interaction Hardware
To make the customization system accessible workshop participants, I designed a custom MIDI controller that translated physical inputs into parametric adjustments within the Grasshopper definition.
The MIDI controller mapped physical inputs directly to Grasshopper parameters, allowing non-technical participants to interact with a generative design system in real time.
By simplifying complex computational controls into tactile inputs, the system created an approachable and playful interaction model that encouraged experimentation while maintaining real-time responsiveness.
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.
