Puma’s BioEvolution Project Introduces A Shoe That Adapts To The Body

Will Puma's fashion tech exploration into materials, going to make them pioneers in the use of biodesign in sportswear?

Following our recent write up on the Puma’s first augmented reality shoe, the QD CELL Origin AR, we are following it up with the BioEvolution shoe, a pair of sneakers that have been designed to uniquely adapt to the wearer’s body.

Puma Presents an Experimental Sports Shoe

First whispered back in March 2019, the experimental shoe has been catching the attention of many wearable tech enthusiasts and sneakerheads, who are curious about Puma’s BioEvolution project. It is a venture that has been conducted under the creative curation of Innovation by Design – a global, multidisciplinary design & strategy studio founded in 2014, as an MIT Design Lab spin-off.

Working in collaboration with the research organisation Fraunhofer Institute, the shoe has been created using biologically active materials that adapt to the wearer’s foot uniquely. The shoe impressively features a biologically active layer of the shoe-upper that acts as a dense nanosensor net and at a microscopic level maps the areas of the foot which produce heat and sweat. This mapping then creates a matching ventilation pattern, or in other words, living micro-organisms selectively remove material to create a unique fit.

Although Puma’s BioEvolution technology is still at an experimental stage, with no commercial version planned at present, Charles Johnson, PUMA’s Global Director of Innovation excitedly shared: “The shoe is not unique by itself – it comes as a blank canvas. It evolves with you when you start to wear it, and it becomes more and more an expression of your body.”

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Founding editor-in-chief of FashNerd.com, Muchaneta is currently one of the leading influencers writing about the merger of fashion with technology and wearable technology. She has also given talks at Premiere Vision, Munich Fabric Start and Pure London, to name a few. Besides working as a fashion innovation consultant for various fashion companies like LVMH Atelier, Muchaneta has also contributed to Vogue Business, is a senior contributor at The Interline and an associate lecturer at London College of Fashion, UAL.