Home to designer footwear both rare and delicate, the Bata Shoe Museum has been curated around an experience that's more look than touch, until now. This week the Toronto institution has launched a set of Design-A-Shoe Kiosks within their exhibition hall, massive LED touchscreens made to match the expansive surfaces of the drawing tables used by professional designers. Visitors can choose from five different styles of footwear - moccasins, sandals, high heels, oxfords, and the sneaker. From there they can access slideshows and videos detailing it's origin and what it is that makes each shoe distinct, then set out through the process of making their own by selecting each part - the tongue, heel, vamp, etc. - and assigning a material or decorative embellish. With rhinestones and rayfish leather amongst the choices, users can go as wild with their designs as they want. 

Created by Toronto-based Interactive Research Lab, the custom-made displays are housed in brushed aluminum bases with screens treated so they can withstand spills, leaning, and other daily abuses. Visitors I watched playing with the system were so impressed by the presence of the bases, many of them joked that they half-expected them to kick out an actual shoe like a vending machine. Rather than create computer models from scratch, project leader Michael Baler tells me that his company convinced the museum to allow a selection of their shoe artifacts to be sent out for high-detailed CT scanning, and the result is a model that can be turned and pivoted, viewed from any angle across a large screen.

At the end of the design process visitors can use a touchscreen keyboard to punch in their email address and have a virtual postcard crafted using a picture of their shoe creation sent to their personal account. It arrives as a standard JPEG file and so easy to upload or share across any social network. For museum curators, this last feature was an important one as the feedback they've received from visitors over the past years is that they'd like to have both an interactive experience, but also a little something they can take home with them too.