Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (17 page)

Among the industry’s problems was saturation. Once sneakers had replaced street shoes in all but formal business and professional settings, there was no more room for growth. As the podiatrist and industry analyst William Rossi observed
in 1998, annual consumption of shoes per capita had doubled from 2.5 pairs in 1920 to 5 pairs in 1978 but had remained steady since then; athletic shoes had taken market share from dress footwear. And contrary to the images of advertising and popular culture, people were actually spending significantly less of their income on footwear: from 1.4 percent in 1960 to 0.6 percent in 1997. Athletic-shoe
marketers could find no major new categories to offer after the aerobics, cross-training, and walking shoe introductions of the 1980s. Besides, in 1998, 54 percent of shoes were bought only for casual use, 17 percent for walking for exercise, and only 27 percent for sports participation. In 1997, the youth market began to shift to “brown shoes,” including chunky hiking boots, more durable
for city commuting and often costing no more than sneakers. Some manufacturers began to adapt construction techniques from athletic-shoe making to produce leather street shoes; but
these underscored the loss of interest in the sneaker look. Meanwhile, claims of technical innovation by sneaker manufacturers were sounding less credible. Rossi believed they were exaggerating their technological innovations,
observing that while other industries spend an average of 3.7 percent of sales on research and development, the leading athletic shoe companies together spent only a fourteenth of a percent and had made no significant innovation over the last five or ten years.

The very organizational and technical successes of the manufacturers introduce new problems. When the same model is produced by multiple
international sources, differences arise not only in appearance but in fit. And familiar, favorite designs disappear in the quest for novelty; their rapid changes recall the annual automobile redesigns of the 1950s that now even Detroit has long since abandoned. No wonder that since the early 1990s many consumers have rediscovered Keds and other sneakers of old-fashioned canvas and rubber with
the familiar “fox banding” stripe where the upper and sole join.

For all this, the athletic-shoe industry still has a formidable base of designers and biomechanics specialists and may transform itself again. Nike, for example, is continuing to extend the Air sole to cushion more and more of the foot with less foam, and has been developing models with a springy plastic structure that eliminates
the need for any midsole. But since most shoes are still bought for mainly nonathletic use, it is uncertain whether the 1980s boom can be repeated. The big future market may be in the sandal wearers of developing countries: in 1998 even Nike announced a new line of low-priced canvas shoes at $15, for distribution only in the Third World.
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Most seriously for the sneaker industry, it began to
lose its cachet with the press in the late 1990s. Without important new “operational” ideas like the Air sole and the Pump, and with the retirement of Michael Jordan from the Chicago Bulls, the industry was losing its dramatic appeal even as individual companies slumped or bounced back. British
Vogue
proclaimed the “Death of the Trainer” (running shoe), which was turning into “the antithesis of
cool … a prop to bluff [one’s] way into the world of hip.” Now the athletic shoe was stigmatized as “bourgeois.” “Fashionistas,” as the fashion historian Valerie Steele has observed, are always seeking something new in sports footwear yet are seldom athletic themselves. One result is the rise of sneaker-inspired high-fashion street shoes that defy the ideology of the technical performance shoe.
A designer for the Acupuncture brand disavows sports, proclaiming “vanity and fashion” as his goals.
One specimen at a recent Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition that Steele organized was a decidedly nontechnical Prada Sport model with an elastic cord threaded through a pull-through fastener. On the same theme, the French company No Name produces a shoe with a canvas upper mounted on a
thick ripple sole like a row of cylinders, weighted to let the wearer experience new techniques of walking: a cross between a sneaker and a running shoe. Other footwear in the exhibition had beautiful and complex sole designs that would soon have been obliterated by any strenuous activity. A London critic hammered the 1999 Nike Air Zoom Seismic as a “nylon tube” with a “thick coating of style that
will look redundant next month” and is designed to degrade its own intricate sole ornament. (Expendability is not a new principle; some women’s dress shoes of the early nineteenth century could be ruined in a single night of dancing.) Leading fashion brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Nautica, and DKNY began to introduce their own lines of designer sneakers through department stores—a trend warily noted
by the AFA. Is this the beginning of a new cycle of popularity or a sign of the end of an old one?
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There has been still more bad news for the industry, the unwanted celebrity endorsers. The Nike “swoosh” logo began to turn up on capsules containing the illegal hallucinogen/stimulant Ecstasy, sold as “Purple Nike Swirl”; athletic shoes at one time were de rigueur at the rave dances Ecstasy helped
animate. In 1997 the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult outfitted themselves in new black Nike tennis shoes before their mass suicide, announced on the Internet, as they prepared to rendezvous with extraterrestrials in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet. Whether it was a sardonic comment on the consumer society they were leaving or an invocation of the manufacturer’s advertising slogan of the time,
“Just do it,” the gesture showed the exposure of megabrands to uses beyond the powers of trademark lawyers. In January 1999, the U.S. retail chain Just for Feet ran an advertisement featuring the capture and drugging of a barefoot Kenyan male marathoner by a largely white paramilitary team who lace running shoes on his feet; it provoked accusations and denials of racism and a round of financial
troubles and lawsuits. Not that these necessarily harmed sales. In one of the protests against the low wages paid to workers in the factories owned by the shoe manufacturers’ contractors, a rioter at the December 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization was observed smashing windows of the Seattle Nike Town showroom while wearing Nike shoes.
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The great surprise for athletic-shoe
manufacturers at the turn of the century has not been such incidents. It has, rather, been the graying of the sneaker. The AFA reports that younger people are a static or diminishing market, and middle-aged and older people a growing one. Between 1992 and 1998, teenagers’ share of sneaker purchases slumped from 18 percent to 16 percent, college-age buyers’ share was almost unchanged, and twenty-five-
to thirty-four-year-olds’ share dropped from 24 percent to 20 percent. The greatest growth was among forty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds (who went from buying 9 percent of athletic shoes to buying 12 percent) and those aged fifty-five and up (whose share went from 10 percent to 13 percent). Slippage among younger groups concerns the industry because young people are the most enthusiastic consumers
of higher-priced models. As a spokesman for the National Sporting Goods Association observed, “If a fifteen-year-old sees his or her parents wearing a pair of Nikes or a pair of athletic shoes, they think, ‘That must not be so cool if my parents are doing it.’” The trend also suggests that sneakers may be coming full circle after a generation or two. In 1961, the recently elected California
attorney general Stanley Mosk looked into a newly notorious and allegedly sinister conservative organization, the John Birch Society, and dismissed it in a letter to Governor Edmund G. Brown as “wealthy businessmen, retired military officers and little old ladies in tennis shoes,” thus launching an immortal cliché. Mosk later recalled attending Birch Society meetings, where those little old ladies
“were the first to arrive and the last to leave and they were always making motions—and their feet hurt, so they wore tennis shoes.” But then, older people may have always been more enthusiastic buyers than manufacturers liked to acknowledge. During the 1980 New York transit strike, when wearing sneakers to and at work first became fashionable, one specialty store manager was struck by “the old ladies
leaving the store in red, white and blue and orange shoes.”
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The popularity of athletic shoes in an aging society raises the question of whether they are healthier than the footwear they have displaced. Although running-shoe manufacturers retain some of the world’s leading biomechanics specialists, a group of researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, including the physician Steven E.
Robbins and the engineer Robert Gouw, have challenged assertions that contemporary running shoes are safer than yesterday’s sneakers, especially for older wearers. In a variety of laboratory conditions, they have found that older volunteers are
more likely to lose their balance in footwear with softer midsoles. They have pointed to other studies suggesting that injuries were 123 percent higher
among runners wearing the most expensive shoes than among those equipped with the cheapest models. Softer soles appear to encourage higher impacts during running, as thick, soft mats in gymnastics result in 20 percent to 25 percent greater impact on landing. Advanced midsoles, these researchers argue, promote subtle misjudgments by reducing the sensory feedback (proprioception) that runners and walkers
get each time a foot makes contact with a surface—the feeling we get of where we are and what we are doing. Robbins, a barefoot running enthusiast, has cited a number of reports suggesting low rates of impact-related foot injury among barefoot athletes and customarily unshod populations. Like people with neurological disease, runners can damage their feet when feedback is inadequate. Shoes
also tend to interfere with the natural extension and contraction of muscles and tendons. Athletes unconsciously tend to land harder to improve stability by compressing the material. Runners and walkers wearing hard-soled shoes, on the other hand, unconsciously adopt a better technique, bending knees and hips more deeply and getting natural shock protection in dipping slightly closer to the ground.
Further, Robbins has argued, arch supports interfere with the natural cushioning of foot bones. More recently, he has even suggested that not the intrinsic properties of the material but “deceptive” advertising by manufacturers may be to blame for injuries. Volunteers landed with significantly higher impact on a surface when told it was designed for especially effective absorption of shock. The
mystique of protection, Robbins and his coauthor argued, encourages people to take greater risks.
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Robbins’s ideas are intriguing, but they are disputed by other bio-mechanics specialists. The one study he cites of actual runners uses data from 1983 and 1984. Laboratory research can suggest human performance in training and competitive conditions, but very little has been published about the
everyday safety of sport-shoe designs. Shoes differ not only in cushioning materials and thickness but in outsole and upper materials and even lacing patterns, all of which may affect injuries. Manufacturers point out that Robbins and his colleagues have tested only a small number of midsole designs. Specialists outside the industry say that trial and error is a better shoe-buying strategy than choosing
the lightest and cheapest brand. Yet as some of Robbins’s critics acknowledge, his results may help develop better shoe designs even if his conclusions are unproved. Indeed, there has
long been a small group of serious runners who have their own techniques for slicing out cushioning and supports with razor knives.
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Robbins and his collaborators are not so far from their critics’ positions as
they sometimes seem. They realize that barefoot running is not an option for most people in industrial countries. They also recognize that older people rate thin, hard soles much lower in comfort than younger people do. And in their study of footwear and balance in the elderly, Robbins and his coauthors had to concede that on the balance beam used in the test, walking barefoot resulted in instability
171 percent more often than did walking in shoes with thin, hard soles—and 19 percent more often than walking in shoes with thick, soft soles. Bare feet may be hazardous to the health of the elderly; doctors should suggest to older patients with a history of falls that they “avoid barefoot locomotion completely, and wear footwear with hard soles at all times when upright.” If further research
confirms their conclusions, sneakers with high-traction rubber soles may replace our grandparents’ hazardous smooth-soled slippers. And running-shoe manufacturers, always alert to changing markets, will no doubt create a new generation of dynamic-looking, firmer-soled but comfortable sneakers for aging baby boomers, especially those who join the growing number of senior runners. Just as it helped
link inner-city culture with suburban sports fandom, the sneaker may connect the youth movement of the 1960s, the fitness boom of the 1970s, and a new elder culture that is still in its infancy.
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And what of the sneaker as a global shoe? A recent
National Geographic
magazine article on Pakistan illustrates a barefoot rural schoolboy, ship-breakers (dismantlers of oceangoing vessels) apparently
in sandals, and sneaker-wearing students at an exclusive boys’ secondary school in Lahore. But it also quotes a young, American-educated progressive landowner who no longer wears his San Francisco—bought sneakers in the fields but prefers indigenous khusas, slippers of pliant kidskin that, as he relates, let him “feel the soil through the soles of my feet and know, as I walk the land, just what
to plant where.” Footwear can promote not only biomechanical performance but the body techniques by which we relate to the earth.
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J
UST AS BILL BOWERMAN
was testing new soles in the late 1970s, industrial designers and architects were planning a new generation of office seating. High-performance sneakers and chairs—instruments of the active and the sedentary life, respectively—might seem to have little in common. One moves with us, and the other generally stays put. (Wearable
seating has won design prizes but rarely appears on the market.) But for the techniques of the body, seating is to the back what shoes are to the feet. Chairs both reflect and shape how we move and how we rest. Like shoes, they can become intimately linked with their users, extensions of the self, molding themselves to our bodies but also reshaping the people they contain. Shod people and chair-sitting
people, even in agricultural and artisanal societies, are already transforming themselves technologically, beginning to fuse with the objects around them.

The television commentator Andy Rooney has described this feeling insightfully. For thirty years, he wrote in 1989, he had used a leather living room chair that would have been more than three sizes too large, if seating were sold like shoes—as
he believes it should be. Because his legs could not bend if he sat back, he sat “slumped way down in it with my legs resting on a footstool,” a position so relaxing it induced sleep. Yet he hesitated to give the chair away, partly because it had become so shabby, but also because it had taken his shape “the way a pair of shoes finally conforms to the shape of your feet just before you have to
throw them away.” Discarding it would be like putting an ailing but beloved dog to sleep. Having made chairs in his home workshop, Rooney observed that no matter how much measurement, study, and thought one puts into a chair, it can be
tested only by actually building it. By then it is too late to modify the shape.
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Shoes and chairs have been linked not just in popular culture but on the frontiers
of science and design. It was no coincidence that the tighter men’s and women’s shoe fashions became in the mid- to late nineteenth century the greater the interest in comfortable furniture. As the English costume reformer Ada S. Ballin wrote in 1885: “It is only natural that when progression is so painful, as I have known it to be in fashionable boots or shoes, people should prefer to remain
at home on an easy chair or on a sofa.” At the origins of modern ergonomics, the German-born Zurich paleontologist and anatomist Hermann von Meyer (1815–1892) wrote not only the first popular scientific work on shoe fitting, starting the movement for healthier footwear, but also a pioneering article on the mechanics of sitting and its implications for school furniture. In our own time, both athletic
footwear and seating have combined traditional and new materials, from canvas and leather to (beginning in the 1960s) synthetic meshes, to simplify production and improve performance. In 1968, the American designer Richard Neagle even invented the first armchair with a vacuum-formed plastic shell—coincidentally it was called the Nike chair. Its cushions, like the midsoles of many later athletic
shoes, were of polyurethane foam. The English designer Jasper Morrison claimed inspiration from the padding of his girlfriend’s Prada loafers for the upholstery of his Low Pad armless lounge chair, now in the Tate Modern museum. And as we will see, the premium version of Niels Diffrient’s new office chair uses a gel earlier employed in some sneaker midsoles.
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While
most complex societies have developed some kind of footwear, only a minority of world cultures used chairs until a century or two ago. Even in Europe, movable furniture spread only in the Renaissance and early modern period, and chairs were beyond the reach of many well into the eighteenth century.

Before the chair spread around the world, humanity had the greatest repertory of postures of any
species. Other animals acquire and transmit tool-using behavior culturally, but their positions and movements have not appeared, so far, to vary from one region to another. Humanity is the only species that can tell its young to sit up straight, or otherwise. We can shape not only our own posture but the behavior of other animals into
gaits they may not regularly adopt in nature, down to the high-stepping
maneuvers of the Lippizaner horses of Vienna’s Spanish Riding School. Human technology also opens new resting possibilities for other animals. I once saw a tame parrot in Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo that enjoyed lying on its back, feet clasped together, as a docent slid it down a concave polished bronze railing. Cockatoos can even learn to roller-skate.

In a landmark article in 1957, the anthropologist
Gordon W. Hewes observed that humans can sit, squat, kneel, and stand steadily in about a thousand ways. These are only the static positions; only limited documentation exists of walking, running, and jumping styles. While many Western travelers have brought seating furniture with them into the field, others have discovered the rationality of some traditional ways. In South America, the
U.S. explorer William Beebe learned the Indian technique of squatting on his heels. By varying it—changing foot positions and resting his chin, his armpits, or his elbows on his knees—he discovered that he could stay in one spot for hours while relaxing every muscle. Of human postures, this deep squat may be as widely distributed as chair sitting, being used by about a quarter of humanity when Hewes
wrote. It is also closest to the resting stance of the chimpanzee, is comfortable for small children in all societies, and, Hewes speculated, might be a lifelong practice if cultures did not socialize the young into other positions. Among these, chair sitting has been the minority practice, a technique and a technology that originated about five thousand years ago in the Near East. In Egypt and
Mesopotamia, chairs were reserved for high personages, and stools, too, were luxuries. The wealthy spent much of their lives at ground level. Workers had no seating. In the remarkable miniatures of the tomb of a senior official of Egypt’s Old Kingdom in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, butchers, bakers, weavers, and scribes work either standing or squatting. Even in the New Kingdom, luxurious chairs
were often broad and close to the ground. (On the other hand, Egyptians rich and poor could not sleep well without headrests that we would consider the height of discomfort.)
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In Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, the Arab conquests ended the prestige of the chair for a millennium. Wood was rare and precious in Arabia, but leather and wool were affordable. Elevated sitting was mixed with
reclining on a variety of cushions and raised platforms; even the words
divan
and
ottoman
are Middle Eastern in origin. When we find an illustration of a sixteenth-century Ottoman official sitting on a Renaissance X-frame (Savonarola) chair, it turns out to be an English convert to Islam, Hasan Aga, originally Samson Rowlie. An early-nineteenth-century illustration
of the Ottoman governor of Egypt,
Muhammad Ali Pasha, receiving Western European advisers depicts the governor sitting cross-legged on a raised, cushion-backed, carpeted platform; the Ottoman advisers are standing, and a scribe sits on the floor. The Europeans are sitting with their feet on the floor.
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It was not only the Arabs and Ottoman Turks who conquered and governed empires and cultivated the arts and sciences without chairs.
The complex cultures of Asia flourished at floor level. In China, mat-level living prevailed in the low-ceilinged buildings from the Shang dynasty (which ended about 1000
B.C.
) through the Han dynasty (which ended in
A.D.
200). As in ancient Greece, squatting was considered vulgar and disrespectful. Etiquette books taught kneeling and cross-legged sitting until the third century
A.D.
, when good
form began to dictate extended legs, leading to the first armrests and cushions. Beginning in the fifth century
A.D.
, political disruptions and the influence of northern nomadic peoples began to change Chinese ways. For reasons that are not completely clear, houses were taller and more spacious. Folding stools, which had long been known from trade with the West, now took their place in Chinese
households. Some but not all Buddhist figures in murals of the period sit on stools and beds with legs hanging down. Gradually from the seventh through the tenth centuries, the Chinese started to use folding stools and other furniture. To the art historian Sarah Handler, economic and social development during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) became decisive. The rise of a cash economy spread wealth and
education, undermining paternalist hierarchies and leading even ordinary people to aspire to the raised seating that had been introduced at court. Chairs in turn promoted more democratic dining on raised tables, and by eliminating mats encouraged the wearing of shoes indoors. When European furniture was still massive and built in, Chinese artisans were developing elegant sets of movable chairs and
tables.
⁵

Why did Japan not follow China in elevated living and working? One reason may be that just as Chinese material culture was changing, Japanese society was becoming more independent of China, developing its own scripts and some of its greatest literary works. Buddhism, with its cross-legged and kneeling meditative positions, and the later prestige of the tea ceremony, promoted mat-level
living. The traditional Japanese house also remained much more suitable for Japan’s climate, warmer and more humid than China’s. Folding chairs were occasionally imported and even made locally, but they were difficult to integrate into Japanese dwellings. Their
legs could damage the woven rush surface of tatami mats, around which traditional Japanese domestic space is organized. And even if floors
could be protected, the view from a chair would compromise the elegant proportions of the house, while the chair itself would interfere with the deployment of the futons that otherwise could turn any room into a bedroom.

Industrialization accompanied chair-sitting but did not cause it. Traditional Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Japanese administrators, scholars, and merchants had no need for
Western chairs; less obviously, neither did machine operators. An American ergonomist visiting India recently discovered that an apparently Westernized factory, with machine tools on pedestals and operators sitting on stools, had once functioned with equipment and men at ground level. In the absence of visitors, operators would assume their traditional positions, with their legs folded under them
on the stools. Even today, at least one standard ergonomics text reminds engineers to take low, chairless positions into account when designing equipment for non-Western factories. In 1968, the Stanford Research Institute even developed an experimental “yoga workstation” with a floor-level cushion.
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The spread of chairs was less functional than social. It began with cross-cultural encounters
of diplomats and officials. Even before the European domination of South Asia and Africa, the rulers of non-Western societies were providing chairs for their European and North American guests. But this concession created a dilemma in protocol. Universally, a higher seating position is a sign of dominance, as is sitting in the presence of others who must stand. Some societies, like the Ottoman Empire,
had their own raised seating. In others, especially in South and East Asia, elites learned Western seating styles. A first step was the construction of special rooms for these encounters as annexes to traditional public buildings and residences. More and more public business was transacted in offices with stools and desks, while the family and social spheres remained at mat level. In an 1838
engraving of a fashionable Damascus riverside coffeehouse, for example, customers sit cross-legged on carpets or mats.
⁷

Africa followed a different pattern. While sub-Saharan Africans lived at mat level, many African societies used low, carved stools, often highly personal objects even considered to embody their owners’ souls. The Golden Stool of the Asante in present-day Ghana still is believed
to contain the soul of its nation, may not be occupied even by royalty, and is displayed only occasionally. When Portuguese merchants brought the first Western armchairs to West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chiefs
commissioned their own artisans to create new seating, embellishing European forms with indigenous motifs. The high-backed chair became a super-stool, a throne.
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Up to a point, mat-level and chair-sitting practices can coexist. While urbanization has been spreading European-style chairs in Africa, traditional African stools and chairs were generally low and used without tables. In other societies, including China, chairs were at first introduced for men alone; women’s use of them was a serious breach of etiquette. In colonial South America, even into the
nineteenth century in a few areas, men sat in chairs while women occupied low platforms called
estrados
, which were covered with rugs and cushions. During the Moorish occupation of Spain both sexes had lived thus, but in Christian Spain and some of its New World colonies the
estrado
became a female zone. Women dined off low tables, and sometimes even off cloths laid on the carpet, picnic-style.
(Late in the colonial era, the Franciscans may have promoted the use of low side chairs by the Zuni of Mew Mexico as a form of cultural control.) And globalization has not completely erased sexism from seating. In a capsule of Year 2000 objects assembled by the
New York Times
is a stool from Zimbabwe called a
zvigaro
. As a young bank clerk explains in a label, it “is meant for the father to sit
on. The mother sits on a traditional mat,” showing that “in our culture a man is more important, and that we cannot all be equal.”
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