QUOTE (hobgoblin @ Dec 1 2010, 08:32 PM)

There is a link in the article back to the creator of the design, and he seems to have worked for Nike and some other sports gear companies before.
Nah, to me it looks like he slapped various sport company logo's onto designs he did in design school. Which is grounds for expulsion here in the USA, but probably allowed or even required the designers country of origen (eastern block, by the look of the grammar- they have some VERY good, active designers).
As a former bike mechanic, I'd say the bike design he supposedly did for Bianchi would be difficult (or even impossible) to produce (especially for Biachi, as they don't make cranksets), and would carry a hefty weight penalty (a pretty biog no-no for a tri bike). So if he was working for them, it was in some pie-in-sky department.
The shoe with the tri-angulated sole just plain scares me. The mechanics of its compression would all but ensure you twist your ankle on a regular basis, due to squirming and traction loss as the segments fold over. Cool looking, but bad physics.
The "armadillo cleats"? Can't you just see the pain of not being able to put your foot flat because there's soil caught in between the segments?
Despite this, I wouldn't write him off as a pimply geek- he's a talented designer and marketer. But those are not products likely to ever see production in anything like the original form. Which is fine- the same holds for a huge range of existing products that had cool initial designs that ran up against the wall of real world engeneering and product testing, and ended up retaining only some cosmetic clues to the original design conception.