EXOSKYN is not a sneaker in the ordinary sense. It is a second skin, a body interface, a manifesto in motion.

Designed for KORUX, the emerging Lyon-based brand, this project was born from research into the relationship between body, material and technology. It explores how an object can become an extension of the living — in dialogue with anatomy, movement and perception.

Inspired by the skeletal structure of the foot, EXOSKYN takes the form of a continuous 3D-printed envelope, flexible and adaptable. The shoe becomes an organic architecture, conceived as an interface rather than simply a product.

This work has been the subject of a dedicated article in Yanko Design, an international reference media in the field of design, innovation and contemporary creation. This publication represents an important recognition for the project, but also for the approach behind it: a vision of design as a space of exploration, research and lived experience.

Why Yanko Design?

Yanko Design is one of the most widely read design media internationally. It covers product design, industrial design, conceptual design — with a particular sensitivity to projects that push the boundaries of existing typologies. Being featured there means the project has passed a rigorous editorial filter: it must offer something genuinely new, genuinely thought through, genuinely worth discussing.

EXOSKYN met this bar because it is not a stylistic exercise. It is a research project with a clear hypothesis, a documented method, and measurable results — in the form of a physical object that demonstrates the concept.

Design as Research

The Yanko Design publication validates an approach to design as research — not research in the academic sense of papers and citations, but research in the design sense: identifying an unsolved problem, formulating a hypothesis, testing it through making, evaluating the result. EXOSKYN is the result of this process.

EXOSKYN — bio-inspired 3D-printed sneaker by Mahdi Naim Studio for KORUX. Featured in Yanko Design.