Product Design class uses virtual reality for shoe design

Product Design students at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) are keeping up to date with the emerging technologies that are becoming industry standard. In the junior Advanced Digital Modeling course, instructor Frank Savage has incorporated Gravity Sketch, a virtual reality platform, into a shoe design assignment.

“I think it’s very good for product designers to stay up with the emerging technologies,” explains Savage. “[Students] are supposed to be exposed to industry leading protocols and tools. So that’s computer modeling, and one that’s coming pretty fast now is Gravity Sketch.”

Product designers often use VR software like Gravity Sketch in internships and professional settings, and MIAD’s instructors and labs are keeping pace to prepare students for an evolving technology landscape after graduation.

Savage worked with MIAD’s Lubar Emerging Technology Center to provide virtual reality (VR) headsets and software to each student. The VR headsets were purchased by the Emerging Technology Center with generous support from the A. O. Smith Foundation and the Ralph Evinrude Foundation.

“When you have a technology that has that very unique value proposition to a workflow, getting it into the college quickly and playing with it verbally allows us to assess the value and be ready for when it starts to become an industry standard,” explains Ben Dembroski ’02, managing director of emerging technology and institutional labs.

“It’s one additional way to think about designing. This isn’t replacing something else,” clarifies Savage. Gravity Sketch allows designers to sketch an idea in 3D, then manipulate and refine it, scaling the design to a relative size as big as a whole room.

“By the time our incoming freshman class graduates, for many of them who will be product designers, designing in VR as part of the workflow is going to become more of a standard expectation,” finishes Dembroski.

Gravity Sketch is not used only by MIAD’s Product Design students. The newly launched Independent Inquiry Program is supporting Galilea Cerda ’26, a Fashion and Apparel Design student exploring virtual draping in Gravity Sketch. And as the tool becomes more widely used across the college, Dembroski has started seeing increased demand across classrooms and majors.

Learn more about MIAD’s Emerging Technology Center and Product Design major!