Footshell - Biodesign Challenge

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Isabella Giraldo, Elena Hoyos, Francesca Sarmiento, Isabela Ferro, Sofía Insignares y Sergio Álvarez

Biodesign Challenge

Profesoras: Giovanna Danies y Carolina Obregón

2020-2

Foot Shell seeks to empower communities by making them aware of their potential, and generating additional employment. We foster a co-design process favoring local production and becoming an exemplary system and role model to other coastal communities. In other words, flip flops are our basic product, which symbolize the effort of a community and their will to take care of our ecosystems, but what we really want is to trace new paths for sustainable development even in the most remote places of our country (Colombia).

Foot Shell starts with one community but there are many traces we want to leave, more sites we seek to know, and many alternatives yet to discover. The possibilities are endless and our team is always curious for new materials and new practices that can be improved in order to find a circular system for different communities without breaking traditions. Either way, the path we search always ends with a footshell footprint creating an additional income for a sustainable future, in which co-creation is our main tool and cooperation between people is the greatest opportunity.

By designing an integrated system using shrimp shells generating a biobased material fostering additional income for its fishing communities, starting with the ones in the Colombian coast, located at the Canal del Dique in the northern area of the country.

Taking into account the needs of both the community and the environment, we designed a system of production of biodegradable flip-flops within the communities, making them the main actors of it. This way, Footshell is building a true sustainable circular system, achieving a social, economic and environmental balance in the community.

Colombia’s coastal ecological footprint can be mitigated by achieving the UN’s development goal #12, that offers a framework for responsible consumption and production.

We are a design team from Universidad de los Andes building regenerative systems by co-creating and working with small fishing communities on the Colombian coast, designing a system that seeks to introduce new technical skills, maintaining traditional working practices.