I have had my latest school project entered into the Academy of Art University’s Winter Show. This was the Equity shoe that I began working on in Aric Armon’s Footwear Design class and throughout the semester I had many ups and downs with developing and focusing on a concise finish. Tackling a problem such as women’s equity in the sport of cycling introduced me to and reminded me of the many such inequities and assumed biases found throughout almost every area of society. As such, I must admit, that the project is not complete and I have every intention on continuing with it.

Being a problem solver and looking at previous student’s work in this class, I began the semester with asking how something material like a shoe could influence a larger societal problem. It was suggested I read Don Norman’s Emotional Design which was helpful in explaining how human’s perceive and react to objects and concepts in the physical world. It didn’t exactly get to the heart of my question though; I believe I have come close to the answer with my project, but must admit it is not entirely successful.

The project was rife with external influences, I sought out numerous interviews and conducted them via zoom with people I am familiar with in the [my] cycling world: a former customer who is a competitive triathlete, a former co-worker that is a professional bicycle fit specialist, another industry bike fitter, and a couple deeply entrenched in the industry at the wholesale/retail and race event levels. I selected these folks by my awareness of their experience, but also filtered out of the survey I conducted online. These two tasks (interviews & survey) were at the beginning of my process, prior to the actual focus on women’s equity applied to the shoe—there was still ample technical feedback on how the shoe fits. I wish I had reigned in the focus more to the concept of disparity and equity in the sport. It was almost a failure in my problem statement being slightly amorphous still that caused most participants to put in their perspective on cycling shoe performance characteristics. It was a great learning experience, as was the focus group that I conducted—admittedly the premise might have been framed better, but regardless, valuable feedback was given and applied to the project.

I hope to have a revised version ready for the Spring Show in the next few months that better captures my intention of evoking that conversation of gender equity in competitive cycling [and the larger world] and having that increased awareness of the problem lead to improvements and course corrections.

In the meantime: Equity Shoe