Sketches and Prototyping

At this point in my design process I am looking into the form of my objects. I started sketching as you can see. These are just a few of the forms I explored, other sketches were poor or the shapes outlandish but reiterating the form and exploring all the possibilities was essential. Dean (ex-student and kinda teacher) took us for a work shop on prototyping. so i took my favourite ideas from the sketching and started to turn them into cardboard forms. The progress is shown from left to right the left one being about the 3rd form I explored. I liked it and it linked into the prototyping with the lights in an earlier blog so i started to develop it. In the middle picture I wanted to incorporate more of the visual language of a shoe and so it looks more shoe like and less "what
is it?". I loved the aesthetics of the collar and speaking to Pete about what material to make the shoe from he suggested a wire frame and fabric stretched like the BMW cloth concept car shown below. The picture on the right shows the first attempt at this fabric over wire concept. this fabric had no stretch and so was quite hard to maneuver and shape.
So after taking a pair of tights and stretching them over another wire frame I came up with the basic final form of the ankle shining shoe with a few minor adjustments mainly to do with the curve of the collar. the collar is on the inside of the foot sweeping round to the outside and exposing and illuminating the ankle. I have ordered samples of different types of stretch fabrics which hopefully will come soon. I love the organic shape of the shoe.