Sole maker : towards ultra-personalised shoe design using voronoi diagrams and 3D printing

In this article, we describe the design of a program that allows users to create their personal shoe soles. The program has a backend which generates different components of the sole, such as the treads, the surface, the insole pattern and the contour (where the sole will be connected to the rest of the shoe). Instead of the traditio-nal fixed grids, we use Voronoi diagrams, which have another aesthetic appeal and which allow influencing the dynamic behavior of the sole. This program shows an example of the possibilities of digital fabrication (3D printing) for the personalization of material properties and behavior when combined with mathematical algorithms. Moreover, we highlight our approach and interesting algorithmic aspects like intersecting edges and contours, generating Voronoi diagrams, finding polygons, solving the Chinese postman problem, and solving the travelling salesman problem.