To
give a brief background to those less familiar with Flywire, it was invented by
Jay Meschter, Director of Innovation at Nike, and debuted at the 2007 Athletics
World Championships. Drawing inspiration from the mechanics of a suspension
bridge whereby many cables provide the necessary structural support, Flywire
allows support to be provided by fibers specifically to the areas that require
it the most, namely the forefoot and the heel. Such a targeted support system
avoids using layers of material to support the whole foot thus reducing the
shoe’s net weight by up to 50%.
To
best illustrate this fiber based architecture is by placing a light source
within a shoe. In this case it was a Nike Hyperdunk. The striped and
crisscrossed patterns clearly define the areas that require additional support
for the athlete. The distribution of the fibers across the upper though based
on the mechanics of a suspension bridge fail to capture the vertical linearity
of said bridge. It’s visual similarity is far closer to the architecture of a
dragonfly’s wing a natural design that could benefit the performance of Flywire
further.
The various cellular shapes within a dragonfly’s
wing carry the responsibility of determining the amount of stiffness or
flexibility in that area of the wing whilst being as lightweight as possible.
The somewhat randomized pattern is in fact optimized to allow rigid and
flexible configurations along the span of the wings. For example the quadrilateral areas on the edges
determine the more rigid and stiff portions of the wing while the largely
compartmentalized hexagonal areas are responsible for the areas more likely to
bend and sway. This same set of rules is applicable to the composition of a
shoe.
The
surface of a dragonfly’s wing can be interpreted as the single piece of fabric
that would be used to cover the upper of a shoe. Integrating Flywire into this
single sheet of fabric could allow for the exact same quadrilateral and
hexagonal shapes to be created to reinforce the fabric in the same way it does
for the dragonfly’s wing. By changing the vertically running lines to
compartmentalized hexagonal cells would provided the same amount of support but
increase the amount flexibility. The result would be a shoe that allowed the
foot to move more naturally but with an increased level of support and
protection.
For
such performance benefits the only conceivable compromise to be made would be
in the aesthetic. The clean, simple and symmetrical lines on the current
Hyperdunk would be replaced by a randomized collection of quadrilateral and
hexagonal compartments. But by remaining with the dragonfly wings as the source
of inspiration, the slightly more complex architectural details can be
embellished with colour patterns as good as these:
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