These Shoes Weren't Made for Walking

In making a mechanics exhibit, I wanted to focus on creating a piece that was highly interactive and personal.  While I knew I had a strong idea in making inorganic gears, I had trouble coming up with other ideas.  When I asked a friend what her favorite physics phenomenon was (I was mostly joking) she said she didn't know but that there was physics in everything even walking.  Inspired, I researched the physics of walking which led me to a very interesting article on the physics of walking in high heels, which served as my inspiration for this exhibit.

Having never walked in high heels, I was amazed to learn how wearing high heels fundamentally changes how you walk and present yourself.  To walk with any sort of consistency, you have to thrust your chest and hips forward to compensate for a new center of mass, while tightening your calves in order to account for a loss in stability.

A few thoughts ran through my mind immediately.  First and foremost, I was excited about the concept of having those who have never walked in high heels experience what it was like and discovering that you had to change how you walked.  Second, realizing how much high heels changed the way you walked, I wondered if I could create other shoes that also fundamentally changed the way you walked and that gave users a greater consciousness of the way they walked.  I realized the best way for users to understand the incredible mechanics behind walking was to push them outside of their comfort zone by forcing them to learn to walk in a very different way.

When I set about building prototypes, my goals were to create shoes that altered both stability and center of mass.  Additionally, while I wanted to have others feel what it was like to walk in high heels and other less natural forms of footwear, I didn't want the idea of wearing heels to be a deterrent and focused on creating shoes that suggested function over form.

A friend strapping on some of the shoes

I created three pairs of shoes – wedges, inverse wedges, and a pair of heel-less, and unstable shoes – three basic options that demonstrated three different ways of walking.  Once finished, as with my other mechanics exhibits, I had my fellow housemates try on these shoes.  The results and feedback were overwhelmingly positive.  Those who tried them really enjoyed walking around in them and even found new ways to experiment with them.  Before long, my friends were mixing and matching different shoe types and racing, running, and jumping.

Mixing and matching different shoes

While these shoes were a great success, if I were to develop this into an exhibit, I would want to make sure that they were safe, less clunky, and didn't cause injuries.  While I designed these shoes to be purely about interaction and play, I believe that whatever sign accompanies such an exhibit will need to prompt further inquiry through questions that force the user to think critically about the way they walk. Moving forward, I would also like to experiment with variety of other shoes. Shoes that make it extremely difficult to walk in, shoes that give you two left feet or switch your left and right feet as well as shoes that force users to mimic the different ways animals walk.