Job No. 37 - Experienced Sock Designer

Today, while looking through the New York Times job pages I found another design job that would surely allow me to exploit the body of skills I have developed during my twelve years in the video game industry - Experienced Sock Designer.

They asked for the candidates to have ten years of design experience in the hosiery industry. Well, if you replace the word 'hosiery' with 'game' then I can answer truthfully that, yes, I do have ten years of design experience. So that's exactly what I did...

Now, some of you may feel that the sock world is a rather easy place to practise one's designing - since socks all seem to look pretty much the same - but you'd be surprised just how radically different individual socks can be. No, far from being the dull business you might imagine, the world of sock design is an incredibly exciting world of hydrophilic and hydrophobic fibres, of thermal insulation and lateral shear forces...

I feel that sock design would be a step in the right direction for me - if I can just get a foot in the door, I'm sure I can achieve great things. Therefore, I knew that my application would need to be both highly original and tremendously impressive - and a covering letter wasn't going to be enough to do that. I needed to put some work in to show them that I meant business; I needed to show them that I had the cajones to turn the world of sock design upside down; I needed...

...smart-sock

Designed as an answer to the three most pressing problems in modern sock design, smart-sock is my design for a true, 21st century sock and I supplied the company not only with an artistic mock-up of smart-sock but also the following, comprehensive, technical overview of the proposed product:

Smart-Sock™

Smart-Sock marks the evolution of sock based designs – incorporating the very latest advances in both electronics and fabrics, to bring sock design into the 21^st century.

Material Properties
The current generation of socks are generally constructed from cotton, wool, nylon or polypropylene. While this has been acceptable throughout the 20^th century, the modern sock consumer is more demanding and wants a sock that won’t wear out after a day at the office, or won’t develop a hole while playing sport. Consequently, I would propose the construction of socks from Nextel ceramic fabric.

Nextel is an advanced fabric fashioned from ceramic fibres that not only provides extensive heat resistance (full fire resistance for over four minutes at 2000 F) but also offers the bonus of being extremely hard wearing. By my estimates a pair of Nextel socks could last as long as 200 years (assuming the socks are passed down from generation to generation after the death of the initial consumer).

Electronics
The modern consumer expects innovation and electronic components in their everyday items and smart-sock™ delivers on every front, featuring three, fully water resistant, systems:

1) Active GPS Tracking. No more will consumers lose their socks – installed in the heel of each sock is a micro-GPS tracking device that, when linked to the consumer’s home PC, allows them to instantly determine the location of any sock they own to within a three metre radius globally.

2) Sweat Monitor. The average foot contains over 250,000 sweat glands and there is little more disconcerting than the smell of overripe socks. Smart-sock™ solves this problem by monitoring in real-time the overall levels of sweat within the sock fabric; if they reach dangerous levels they will sound;

3) Dual Tone Alarm. The dual tone alarm has two sounds – a standard tone (which warns the consumer that there sock is passing sweat threshold levels) and a semitone higher pitch that can be activated if the consumer utilises their ‘lost sock GPS protocol’ – this will assist the consumer in being able to locate their sock more easily

I believe smart-sock™ is the future of sock technologies and I hope you will share my vision…

I am certain that my hard work and innovation will be rewarded and that, before too long, I will have been snapped up to implement the design and production of what may well go down in history as the greatest sock of all time...