From personal to ultra-personalized

We envision a near future where shoe design is more than sketching shoes. Shoe design becomes the crafting of parametrically generated, data-driven, iterative forms along with multi-stakeholder Product Service Systems (PSS). Accomplishing shoes that embody this requires new forms of digital craftsmanship that build upon ever emerging hybrid crafts. New forms of digital craftsmanship are scaffolds of data and digital fabrication into Ultra-Personalized Product Service Systems (UPPSS). In the complex process of UPPSS designers are confronted with challenges; product challenges in negotiating design considerations, with service challenges in customer journeys and systemic challenges in of data flows. Design games are rarely used to design shoes but offer a lot of opportunities. In this article, we describe and deploy a design game for UPPSS shoemaking. The game was designed to help designers to confront these challenges. This included using code to program the digital fabrication of a pair of shoes. The UPPSS game was deployed with 16 industrial design students over nine weeks. Each wrote a reflection on what they learned. The reflections were analyzed to see how the design game resulted in facing the challenges of an UPPSS that is summarized in an interpretive framework. Conclusions were drawn from the challenges and opportunities confronted in the game, and what this meant to the emerging practices of digital craftsmanship and UPPSS.