Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.03.2017, Qupperneq 49

DesignMarch
From Threat
Into Thread
Behind the scenes of the the revolutionary
Adidas x Parley footwear
Words Ciarán Daly

With plastic now polluting every
corner of the globe, plastic pol-
lution remains one of the great-
est blights on the world’s oceans.
From compostable coffee cups to
biodegradable plastic bags, the is-
sue is leading to rapid changes in
the attitudes of designers towards
their projects. One such product
is the Adidas x Parley shoe—foot-
wear partially manufactured from
recycled ocean plastic.
“There’s really been a huge real-
isation in the last few years that we
have to start working in a complete-
ly different way and be conscious of
creating real sustainable products
and implementing real sustain-
ability in production,” explains
Alexander Taylor, the lead innova-
tion and design consultant behind
the Adidas x Parley collaboration.
Alexander was first invited
to work with Adidas in 2008 on a
project for the 2012 Beijing Olym-
pics: the Adidas PrimeKnit shoe.
The project focused on proposing
new ways of manufacturing foot-
wear which sat outside the regular
toolbox of the industry at the time,
and Alexander’s experience in in-
dustrial design proved to be more
than innovative. “I’d never de-
signed a shoe before—my proposal
at that time involved knitting,” he
says. “By taking technology from
the furniture world and using
knitting as a key technology, I pro-
posed that we make some shoes.”
A single process
It was on the back of that project
that Alexander was invited to do
more work with Adidas, oriented
towards proposing new sustain-
able technologies, processes, and
materials. “It was normal at that
time to have fifteen to twenty in-
dividual pieces going into each
shoe—these would be cut out and
sewn together to add support or
functionality,” he explains. “My
brief right then was to see if we
could cut out all the pieces and try
to make the upper part of the shoe
out a single piece of material, us-
ing a single process.”
Since then, Alexander and the
team have developed a number of
different technologies, including
a fibre placement technology that
enabled the creation of the Par-
ley shoe. The intersection of new
technologies (such as 3D print-
ing) and the urgency of sustain-
ability has, Alexander argues, of-
fered designers a new direction.
“Rather than just focusing on the
physical object itself, there’s an
opportunity now for designers to
have a conversation—and be part
of changing the whole process of
creating an object at every level.
Every aspect of creating a new
project becomes a whole system.
That’s where designers have an
opportunity to really make a dif-
ference—more than ever before.
We can work in ways where we can
imagine engineering products in
a way that is cleaner and smarter.
We can also consider the afterlife
of the product and where it’s man-
ufactured so that we can move to-
wards local sustainability.”
The Parley shoe was a perfect
example of this. “It relied on so
many different factors coming to-
gether at the same time—and it just
clicked,” finishes Alexander. “The
shoe had the visual of the waves,
and spoke to the cause in that
way—it came together intuitively.
That’s another tool for designers.
You don’t just see the process and
the material but there’s a commu-
nication within the product itself.”
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49 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 03 — 2017