Project · App design + Computational design + R&D
SCANDALS
Generative footwear that starts with a phone in someone's kitchen. FOOTSCAN — the capture app — photographs a foot, pulls out the landmarks that matter (length, ball widths, heel center, the inside of the big toe), and feeds them to a parametric model that grows a shoe last and sole tuned to that exact foot.
One pipeline, phone to last
Off-the-shelf shoes fit an average foot, and almost nobody has an average foot. SCANDALS is a long-running experiment in closing that gap without a lab full of scanning gear. It is one pipeline with two halves: FOOTSCAN, the consumer-facing capture app, and the generative model it feeds.
FOOTSCAN — the capture app
FOOTSCAN turns a phone camera into a foot-scanning tool. A person photographs their foot next to a sheet of A4 paper — a known scale — and the app reconstructs the geometry and marks the points that matter: the length, the widths across the ball, the heel center, the inside of the big toe. You capture a scan, browse a history of past scans, and tap into any one of them for per-scan detail. It's built in React Native / Expo and runs on iOS and the web, with the scan flow designed to be quick enough to repeat regularly.
The generative half
Those landmarks are not the end product — they are the seed. They feed a parametric model that grows a shoe last and a sole around them, so the form follows the individual foot rather than a generic size chart. The goal is a manufacturable, person-specific shape that starts from a few trusted points instead of a dense, expensive scan.
The interesting problem
Two problems sit at the heart of it. The first is wringing reliable real-world measurements out of a handheld camera and a piece of printer paper, where lighting, angle, and a foot blending into the floor all conspire against you. The second is translating a sparse set of landmarks into a smooth, sensible 3D form — which is where the parametric model in Grasshopper does its work, extrapolating a believable last and sole from just a few trusted points. The app is still in progress.
