Skip to main content

Shoe Tech

Love the idea of shoes that can grow as kids do but also accommodates variations in adult feet. This sounds all around sensible: 

..the sneakers are a smart footwear solution for people who know the pains of inconsistent shoe sizing. They’re also a forgiving solution for short in-store try-on sessions, which might have you convinced that your new pair of shoes fits well—until you spend an hour in them at home and realize they’re tight around the toes. Adjustable shoes accommodate growing feet as well as feet that are slightly different sizes, and they’re more forgiving if you pick the wrong size.

Shoes and innovation have come together before - get them to vacuum the floor. Sounds interesting but not nearly as useful as a shoe that can adjust a bit to fit better

The shoe is a concept product that emerged from an internal company contest that is held every other year. Started in 1991, the Denso contest lets employees pitch new ideas to "foster their creative and innovative design concepts" and chooses 12 finalists to present in Japan.

One of the finalist projects is the Ecology Shoe, which has a small vacuum inside its very large, outer sole. At the heel is a small pedal, which is connected to gears. Every step you take powers the vacuum motor, allowing it to suck up small pieces of debris at a time.

Sneakers have a new avatar thanks to Sara Blakley. The looks and the price point of the thing are not yet what it would take to see every other woman come to work wearing this. Some other heel styles could start making this more interesting to the larger population of women. Then knock-offs will follow until there is a Sneex variant for every budget and taste. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...