Digital techniques are a strategic tool to design new commercial products, reducing time and waste. This is particularly relevant for shoe manufacturing and, in particular, for high-heeled shoes, for which a trade-off between comfort and attractiveness is difficult to achieve. This paper offers a new set of tools to design high-heeled shoes that exploits the synergies between modeling and experiments, aiming at predicting the comfort of such products, improving the manufacturing process by optimizing the design step. As a case study, two actual commercial 11-cm-heel shoe models, differentiated by the openness of the front side, were used to deploy the digital design procedure. A finite-element model was implemented by combining the outcomes from reverse engineering techniques, to reconstruct the foot and shoe topologies, and the experimental characterization of the materials used for the final shoe products. Pressure maps on the toes and the footbed were used as benchmarks for a comparison with experiments, made with commercial sensorized insoles. Non-uniform pressures for both shoe models were observed, with highest values for the closed-shaped specimen that presented peaks of ≈ 160 kPa on the footbed and ≈ 140 kPa on the external toes. The here presented digital approach has the potential to improve the design process that will not require the traditional fabrication of countless handicraft prototypes, saving time and the associated prototyping costs. Finally, although this work focused on a niche of the shoe market, this approach may be extended to other products, which customization has a key role in the manufacturing process.

Graphical abstract

数字技术是设计新的商业产品，减少时间和浪费的战略工具。这对于鞋的制造尤其是高跟鞋尤其重要，因为高跟鞋的舒适性和吸引力之间难以取舍。本文提供了一套用于设计高跟鞋的新工具，该工具利用了建模和实验之间的协同作用，旨在预测此类产品的舒适度，并通过优化设计步骤来改善制造过程。作为案例研究，使用了两种实际的商用11厘米高跟鞋模型（以正面的开放性来区分）来部署数字设计程序。通过结合逆向工程技术的结果来实现有限元模型，以重建脚和鞋的拓扑结构，以及用于最终鞋类产品的材料的实验表征。脚趾和脚垫上的压力图被用作基准，用于与由商用感测鞋垫制成的实验进行比较。观察到两种鞋模型的压力不均匀，闭合形状的样本的最大值最高，在脚垫上的峰值为≈160 kPa，在外部脚趾上的峰值为≈140 kPa。本文介绍的数字方法具有改进设计过程的潜力，该过程将不需要传统的无数手工艺品原型制作，从而节省了时间和相关的原型制作成本。最后，尽管这项工作着眼于鞋市场的利基市场，但这种方法可能会扩展到其他产品，而定制在制造过程中起着关键作用。

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