Dulio, trained as an aerospace engineer, uses this experience as he explores and redefines the challenges of mass customization within the footwear industry - and presents the shoe as work of art.

I would like in the next quarter of an hour to give you a very brief outline of what my personal history is. I consider myself to be sort of an outsider with respect to the other speakers and participants in this conference. This is in the sense that I consider myself mostly a user of technology while all the speakers who gave their presentations before me - and I would imagine most of you attending this presentation - are from the side of delivering and providing technology.

I'm a technology user, I would also go one step further and say I'm a technology addict and this implies bad and good things and I'll try to give an idea of how I cope with that. I'll explain how I have coped with this in my personal history and how I try to cope with this in my professional activity.

Let me start with some basic information about where I come from because I think this is important to let you understand how I came to the activity and the applications that I'm dealing with today. These are a few pictures of my home town. I would guess that maybe only some of you, possibly, or at least a few of you know this place called Vigevano. The reason I'm showing this picture is because there is something that is somehow put together or is shared between Vigevano and Florence. That is the science of the Florence genius here, the science of Florentine or Tuscan genius Leonardo. And by the way Leonardo was working and living in Vigevano in the 14th century in the castle of Vigevano that you see in these pictures.

I show these pictures because history and art, I think, played an important role in my life and in my following professional career. Vigevano is, of course, also a place of shoes. Maybe some of you remember that Vigevano used to be (30 or 40 years ago) the capital of Italy for shoe making. Now most of the shoe production has gone away from Vigevano but still shoe making is very much present. This is actually a picture I took from an exhibition which is going on in these days until next may about stiletto heels because there are some producers in Vigevano that claim that stiletto heels were actually invented in Vigevano. Why do I show it? Because I believe that shoes can be a work of art.

So as you see here, shoes are exhibited in museums like art and inevitably if you happen to be born in a place like Vigevano, shoes are just part of your DNA. This is something I didn't expect at the beginning of my career, my studying at high school and university. I never expected I would have ended up dealing and spending my professional activity in shoemaking. That's actually what has happened.

It is something somehow inevitable - if you were born in a place like the town where I was born. My studies and my school path - if I had to give a definition of my path I would say that it is a history of changes which implies a certain - a good degree of creativity. Creativity for me was already there in my attitude although I did not realize it so clearly when I started with my studies. My first studies were actually very classical studies. In Italy you can choose between a high school degree with a classical background or a high school degree with a technical background. I decided to get a classical background. I don't remember exactly why but I remember that what I did after that was an 180 degrees change, it was going in the direction of technicalities and technology. That was my first passion. Passion, technology, theory, engineering physics mathematics, computers - these were all ingredients of the studies I took when I was in university, and I graduated as an aerospace engineer.

That's why I show this picture about planes, so again from classical to technology. From aerospace my second formal interest was about computers. I first got involved with computers when I was at university, dealing with CAD systems and my next professional interest after my original years in the aerospace industry was in computer technology and computer aided design technology. What I show in this picture is a famous computer aided design application. I was among the first members of the technical support team for this product in the Italian market. That was how I got involved with information technology. What happened next is easy if you just take two plus two: take computers plus shoes and you end up with studying the first applications of computer aided technology for designing shoes. This was how twenty years ago I initially got involved with shoe technology and shoe making. It was completely unexpected. It happened in a way where I could make the best of out my competence at computer aided design systems, since these where the first years when computer aided design applications started to be adopted to the design of shoes.

Today the design process of shoes has becomes almost completely digital, CAD systems have replaced original tools and methods to create and design shoes. As a result the entire design process of shoes is now virtual, or can now be virtually done with digital tools. My current focus and interest professionally is summarized in the sentence that is on top of this slide: "The shoe world goes digital". I'm really fascinated by this statement and I think the more I get involved with this activity, the more I study this field, the more I realize that this is becoming increasingly true.

I prepared some statements that are inspired by my current professional work in the field of footwear that are summarizing why I see the shoe world going more and more digital. It goes from tangible to intangible, it goes from real prototypes to virtual prototypes, from real shops to virtual reality in the shops. To focus on something which is more important, more and more becoming very popular in the footwear world - there is already in Second Life shoes. Companies are exploring and the use of these metaverses or virtual universes as playgrounds for new ideas for presenting products by exhibiting very tangible real products like shoes in these virtual worlds.

So, the shoe world goes digital. Digital design and advanced rendering algorithms are allowing companies to replace more and more physical prototypes with virtual prototypes. I don't even do any more samples of shoes, I just render them in a way that I can use to show them to my clients and to my buyers, even to my consumers - gathering their opinions and feedbacks and without actually making real prototypes. The process for my prototyping activity used to be very manual, very handicraft in the past and it is now becoming more and more digital.

I'm also fascinated in the idea of how technology is changing the shoe world from the viewpoint of consumer perception. One area of interest that I'm dedicating more and more of my time to right now is the use of virtual reality in shops. Especially in relation to selling shoes which are not yet available. This goes together with another field of activity that I'm very much involved with which is the field of customized footwear. Typically customized footwear is footwear that you order, you configure, but that are not in the shop when you actually order them. So how can we somehow give the consumer the feedback of what the shoe will look like, how it will look while they are wearing it? By using applications of virtual reality.

But technology is everywhere. Technology is changing the way the product is thought of and conceived. One area of research which I think is very promising and very much appealing for the future - how to use technology to rethink a very traditional product like shoes. Technology can redesign, conceive in a different way and radically change the nature of the product which you are producing and manufacturing.

Then we have technology in the product, not in the design and concept, but in how you can embed technology into a shoe to give the shoe different performances, to give the shoe a functional behavior that can change in time or somehow change in relation to the mood of the wearer or to the needs of the wearer or to simplify and redesign completely the manufacturing process of shoes. These are three different areas in which technology plays an important role - in the product itself as a concept, embedded in the product and to simplify manufacturing process. But again the key word, the key element is technology.

Footwear and mass customization is my current area of professional activity both in academics and more from the say, consultant activities. What is mass customization? I wonder whether you are aware of what this paradigm says, I don't want to give you a sort of scientific academic definition of mass customization. I simply name here three good points that in my opinion are important and need to be considered when you think of making shoes which are not produced in masses but really customized to the needs, functional requirements and habits of each individual consumer. What I think is very very important is to reestablish something which there in the beginning of the industrial era of producing shoes, and that was lost in time, what I call consumer centricity. Consumers are put back at the beginning and the end of the shoe life cycle.

Product fertilization is another important collateral of dealing as a manufacturer directly with consumers, knowing their tastes and using this knowledge to fertilize the production of traditional kinds of shoes.

And last but not least, market reactivity. By having direct sensors in the market very closely connected to the consumers, a producer has a much faster capability of reacting to market changes, the change in habits and so on and so forth.

These are all there in the applications of mass customization in footwear. This is a technical but it gives you an idea of how a typical front-end solution is normally thought of for selling customized shoes. And you see there are several bits of technology here, scanning technology to measure feet, 3d modeling - so digital technology once more, to reconstruct the size and the body of the feet. And specific technologies to match feet and tools that are used to reproduce the shoes and so and so forth.

Mass customization, consumer centric production of shoes will not be possible without a high level of technology, without a sort of very pervasive use of information technologies specifically. I'd like to conclude my presentation in a sort of summary of how these different disciplines contributed to shape my attitudes to problem solving. So certainly my historical roots, the historic roots of the place where I was born, and my classical background colored my personality and instilled in me a sort of, what I call a pleasure for perfection - a curiosity to discover new things and ideas, together with the robustness and soundness of analytical reasoning. My engineering degree and my engineering studies taught me the power of technology and of scientific work. My current activity, I think, is the perfect synthesis of art and aesthetics. Technology in the way that it is part of the design, manufacturer and commercialization and a human touch in the way that you have to integrate all these various ingredients to produce what I call a successful recipe.

So I think this is what I wanted to tell you, I hope this gave you a better understanding of who I am, what my background is and my current activity.