Shoe fits for design students at Exposure

Monday, November 11, 2013

Shoe fits for design students at Exposure

Industrial design students at Massey’s Wellington campus have put their best foot forward with three separate exhibits at this year’s Exposure exhibition focusing on outdoor and recyclable footwear.

The end of year exhibition of work by final year students at the School of Design at the College of Creative Arts opened to the public at the weekend as part of the BLOW creative arts festival.

Two of the students have devised ways to recycle textile waste to make environmentally friendly shoes.

Following a trip to Kenya, Nick Loubser created casual and comfortable footwear by processing strands of t-shirt scraps.

Fellow student John Chen also used fashion waste, as well as recycled car tyre and ground down reconstituted cork, for his design that focuses on creating a footwear construction method that avoids the use of adhesives between two different materials.

Mr Loubser says the designs addressed an age-old problem for the fashion industry where so much material was lift on the workroom floor.

“Each year millions of tons of textile waste is discarded in landfills. The T (shoe) aims to address aspects of this issue by repurposing textile waste by applying it to footwear.”

This is done by processing strands of t-shirt scraps and adding value to it through handcraft manufacturing methods and basic machinery found commonly with clothing factories worldwide.”

Fellow industrial designer, Geoff Wright, who with Mr Loubser and Mr Chen is part of a new shoe design collective called Simpleton, designed an all terrain footwear solution for a woman with arthritis - a market, he says, that is traditionally neglected by sports brands.

“The material in the sole and upper make the shoes mouldable to individual feet using heat and vacuum mould techniques rarely used in the footwear industry.”

Meanwhile, a fourth student, John van Huenen, made a stool solely comprised of heat-formed used plastic grocery bags.

“It uses basic manufacturing techniques and is designed to raise awareness of the waste issue in Bali among tourists while generating income for local people.”

Exposure is on at Blocks 1,2 and 12 of Massey’s Wellington campus and continues till November 23.

Caption: From top, the T(shoe) by Nick Loubser, John Chen’s shoes made from fashion and industrial waste and Geoff Wright’s Kondura all terrain footwear for women. At right, Bali stool made from used plastic grocery bags.

ENDS

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