sustainable footwear for body and environment

Catherine Willems, a design anthropologist, combines her work as a designer, lecturer and researcher. With a background in Comparative Cultural Scienses at Ghent University and Footwear Design at Art Sutoria in Milan, her PhD brought together biomechanics, anthropology and design sciences. 

 

She explores relations between materials, skills, and design methods in carious communities and questions conventional thinking on design, production and creativity. 

 

In 2017 she founded Future Footwear Foundation to scale up concepts developed for her doctoral research to global activities and sustain the convergence beyond term-limited research.