Another soon to be lost art: tying your shoes

I recently ordered a pair of comfy shoes. This is not actually a point of departure, as most of my shoes are comfy shoes. 99.99% of the time, I’m wearing sneakers. High end, comfy sneakers, with lots of support. But sneakers nonetheless. There’s no comparison between the sneakers I wear now and the P.F. Flyers of my childhood, which were flimsy, thin-soled canvas shoes with no support. But I digress. The comfy shoes I bought recently featured velcro straps.

I didn’t much think of it at the time, but there is one way to look at these shoes – a way I mostly choose to ignore – that screams old lady shoes. (Or shoes for little kids too little to master tying their shoelaces.) If they’d been white, I might have noticed this right away. Or if they’d been billed as orthopedic. But it was only after I wore them a few times that I had my hmmmm moment.

My velcro strap shoes are comfy, but they’re not as supporty as shoes with laces (like my high-end, comfy sneakers) that tie.

I do wear them when I need something a bit less sporty than my Asics or Brooks, but don’t need a dressier, less comfy leather shoe. But I don’t wear them all that much. I suspect they’ll still be around and in still decent shape when the day comes when I start opting for velcro strap old lady shoes.

By that point, however, velcro strap shoes will likely be way far out of date.

By that point, we’ll probably all be wearing self-lacing, app-controlled sneakers.

They’re not widely available as yet, but if you want a pair of $350 sneakers that are Bluetooth-enabled, then Nike’s Adapt BB is your man. Or will be once they hit the market in mid-February.

The Adapt BB — the BB stands for “basketball” — build on Nike’s decades-long dream to create an auto-lacing smart shoe that adapts to wearers’ feet. The company wants to fundamentally change footwear and, of course, sell more shoes.

Imagine: your feet swell during a basketball game because you’ve been running back and forth on the court, and your sneakers detect your blood pressure. Instead of reaching down and untying your laces, the shoes loosen automatically. Never again will you have to fuss around with your laces because, guess what, your shoes already know what you want to do. .”(Source: The Verge)

As someone with a hard-to-fit foot, there is something moderately compelling about this vision. I put on a shoe (no doubt a comfy sneaker of the future) and it detects that I have flat feet, a narrow width, and a truly skinny ankle. Sounds good to me, in a weird sort of way. But that dream shoe is not quite here yet. For Nike:

“That is the broader vision, or the biggest dream, that the product becomes so synergistic to your body. It just knows almost kind of what you’re thinking,” says Eric Avar, VP & creative director at Nike Innovation. “It’s a natural extension of your body.”

I really don’t need my shoes to know what I’m thinking. Historically, when I’ve been thinking about my shoes, those thoughts have been along the lines of “these are killing me,” “when can I kick these suckers off,” or “damn, I’m getting a blister” – problems that go away, for the most part, when you’re wearing comfy, supporty shoes. Those comfy-supporties are pretty much a natural extension of my body, and I don’t need an app telling them what to do.

Oh, sure, sometimes the shoe laces come untied, and I have to find a low wall or step to prop my foot on to tie them back up. But do I really need an app for that?

Anyway, the know-what-you’re-thinking app is a ways away:

This imaginary, all-knowing shoe doesn’t exist yet. Instead, the Adapt BB represent the next step in that dream product journey. This is the shoe that’ll make self-lacing technology available to more people and get them used to the idea of an app-controlled shoe.

While the truly smart shoe may be in the future, in the here an now, the Adapt BB is what’s on offer:

They forgo anything that resembles a lace, and they ship with Bluetooth connectivity so wearers can tighten and loosen their shoes from their phone. They can even choose the color the sneakers emit when in tightening mode.

It seems to me that the time you need to fuss with an app to tighten or loosen your sneakers could just as easily be spent tightening or loosening your laces. And for the life of me, I can’t imagine wanting my sneakers to emit light “when in tightening mode.” Huh?

Anyway, among the techy aspects to the Adapt BB are the components that make up the “lace engine”:

…a microcontroller, 505mAh battery, gyroscope, accelerometer, Bluetooth module, motor, lights, pressure sensor, capacitive touch sensor, temperature sensor, and wireless charging coil.

Yes, you do need to charge the Adapt BB.

Sounds like an awful lot of technology chasing a not particular terrible problem and yielding no appreciate benefits.

But you have to have a “now” before you can have a future “then” and I’m pretty sure that smart-shoes will be a thing.

One thing I enjoy and value about technology is when it’s put to assistive uses. It’s pretty easy to see that self-regulating sneakers could really help people who could use the assist. For now, however, the Adapt BB is just another head scratcher that has me wondering why there’s an app for that. Call me old school, but I still think everyone who’s physically able to should learn to tie their own damned shoelaces. (Most of the time we should be just saying no to velcro.)