Parametric Design furniture
August 20, 2023
Michaela Crie Stone lives and works in Rockport, Maine, where she creates pieces that push the parameters of function by blurring the lines between art, craft, and design.
Revolutionary footwear brand Ica & Kostika launched their first collection, entitled ‘exobiology.’ The series was developed as an investigation of the future of shoe design through the fusion of fashion and computational technology.
The digitally generated, highly intricate shoes are characterized by their futuristic silhouettes. each shoe is meticulously crafted to fit the natural form of the foot. Ica & Kostika employ hybridized techniques to exploit the advantages of various industrial processes, including methods of both additive and subtractive fabrication.
This collection is a celebration of the natural systems that create beautiful intricacies and how we can go beyond nature to create a form engineered to our desires, something otherworldly.
Ica & Kostika have generated four formal strategies in the development of the collection. In the design of the coral shoes, the studio utilized the branching logic of a sea fan, a method which covers a large surface area while remaining lightweight.
The mycelium shoes are inspired by the radial growth of the mycelial branching from mushrooms. The seahorse shoes borrow the sculptural skeletal structure of a seahorse which expresses segments that gradually change in scale. The spine shoes manipulate the vertebrae of the spine to create a continuous form along the foot. Each of these four styles within the series is produced in varying silhouettes or finishes.
