Walking the Future: Bridging Foot Augmentation into Next Steps of Human Augmentation

Over the past decade, a noticeable increase in literature can be seen in wearable foot interfaces, which have evolved from activity tracking to enhancing human capabilities. Our legs, being the largest body limbs, play an essential role in various functions such as locomotion, maintaining balance, supporting proper posture and providing ground-contact using our feet. Hence, foot augmentations offer the opportunity to augment our entire body. However, most prior research focuses on specific application areas, thus affording a research agenda to further understand the full potential of feet in designing augmentations and to contextualize it in the broader human augmentation space. To achieve this, in this workshop, we invite researchers, designers, and practitioners, novice and expert, interested in designing human and foot augmentations. We will discuss how early foot interfaces helped in augmenting humans, and based on current work and trends in foot augmentation, we will formulate strategies for the next steps and discuss the applicability of such strategies in the broader space of human augmentation.