Wacky Pack explores the concept and possibilities of footwear closure, or traditionally speaking, how to tie a shoe. It explores unorthodox construction and fastening methods, creating unique yet diverse interactions between the shoe and the user, providing a new level of improvisation and customization for your day-to-day look. Veg-tanned leather with various thicknesses and metal hardware is used across the pack. Each design was explored and validated through intensive prototyping to finalize the proportion, soling methods, and most importantly, closure system design.
With an Industrial Design education taught in a Bauhaus manner, Ye Shen appreciates the beauty in mass-production and the romance in consumer-centered designs. "There are already so many products existing in this world, why should someone make another one of them?" With thousands of designers creative new products and millions of which being made on a daily basis, Ye had struggled but eventually managed to find his purpose to create: to transcend his products with the infusion of his own functional and emotional perspective. Ye seeks to discover the hidden bond between users, products, and even himself. Ye has built a cat tree in forms of human furniture to investigate the subject of leisure and to tease the fluid identity of viewers and users, the entertained and the entertainers. To seek for a job like any human beings do, Ye built his resume into the form of footwear to start conversations with employers he meets. Ye blends his artistic aesthetic into his quest of building products that are not only user-friendly, but also meaningfully interactive and emotionally provoking, because Ye believes if a product doesn't provide these properties, it has no reason to exist on this earth.
Ye Shen, obsessed with materials and fabrication, comes from an industrial design background. Worshiping unorthodox artistic exploration yet respecting mass production capability, Ye creates and realizes footwear concepts that walks on the fine line between these values.