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THE CHANGING WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY
11
JULY/AUGUST 2012 | www.footwearbiz.com
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“T
he most reliable way to
forecast the future is to
try to understand the
present,” so claimed
John Naisbitt, a US writer known for
his visions of the future: it is what we
will endeavour to do in this article.
His book titled ‘High Tech, High
Touch’ captured in four words
footwear manufacturing today and
how it might become. He affirms that
to be high touch more than simply
high tech, technology must preserve
our humanity rather than intrude
upon it: technology is the creative
product of our imagination.
If we think of footwear and its
constant innovation in terms of styles,
colours and materials or look at the
technologies used for components and
manufacturing processes, we see that
such a statement is certainly true. But
we have also added revolutions and
evolutions to the headline of this
retrospective and predictive article
celebrating World Footwear’s 25th
anniversary.
Looking at a modern shoe factory
equipped with the most high tech
devices, we see proof of these
statements as the human touch is
always there. Machines perform
repetitive tasks diligently and
automatically,
while
workers
concentrate on the delicate steps of the
process, where their skill creates the
added value to produce a perfectly
made shoe, accurately checked and
carefully delivered to the customer.
High tech, however, becomes low
tech and machines that were state of
the art a century ago Naisbitt would
now say are ‘high tech nostalgia’. High
tech is therefore a relative term related
to a defined moment in time or specific
era in the evolution of an industry. Our
focus is on the last 25 years: how the
entire shoe manufacturing process has
changed and the most important
innovations that have driven change.
In time, these too may become
‘vintage’, but will probably drive
noticeable evolutionary trends, the
seeds of which are already clearly
visible today. Five technological
‘revolutions’ of the past 25 years of
footwear production and the five
evolutionary trends that could
transform the industry in future years
are considered.
LASTS
The last is a key element in footwear
production. Among the first things to
be conceived by designers, the whole
design process generally begins with it.
When the design is passed to
production, there is no shoe that can
be built if its corresponding last is not
available. Lasts used to be produced on
mechanical turning lathes until this old
fashioned process was completely
overturned by the introduction of
numerically controlled, or NC, milling
machines.
The old mechanical copying lathes
existed until the 1990s and were a
technology progressively introduced as
shoe production evolved from a craft
to an industry where large quantities of
mass produced lasts were needed to
cope with increased production. In
these machines, a wooden ‘model’ last
was copied using a probe mechanically
linked to the cutting tool and scaled up
and down to generate the different
sizes. It was a simple process, using
High tech, high touch,
revolutions, evolutions
Sergio Dulio
Hotter Shoes
CREDIT: KIRSTY THOMPSON/LANCASHIRE LIFE