Puma is working on a shoe featuring living microbes

Imagine a running shoe that maps the areas of the foot which produce heat and sweat and then creates a unique ventilation pattern, specifically catered to the wearer’s needs. That’s the promise of Puma’s latest innovation, BioEvolution, presented last week at Milan Design Week, in yet another example of how fashion is infiltrating the event. The unique fit is achieved thanks to a layer of biologically active materials (i.e. living microbes) which consume material from those warm, sweaty areas.

“The shoe is not unique by itself -- it comes as a black canvas. It evolves with you, when you start to wear it, and it becomes more and more an expression of your body”, explains Puma’s Global Director of Innovation, Charles Johnson, on the company’s website. The technology is still at an experimental stage, with no commercial release planned for the moment.

The project has been conducted under the creative curation of Innovation by Design, the multidisciplinary design studio founded in 2014 as a spin-off of the MIT Design Lab, with whom Puma has been working on biodesign research since 2017.

Pictures: courtesy of Innovation by Design/Puma