The Portuguese Workshop/Seminar for Designers and Product Managers took place online on 27th May 2021, organized by CTCP – Centro Tecnológico do Calçado de Portugal in cooperation with Klaveness Footwear, both project partners in Portugal. Entitled “Conforto e sustentabilidade no ciclo de vida do produto” (Comfort and Sustainability in the Product Lifecycle) it counted on the participation of 50 people: 44 attendees plus 6 speakers, from 23 different Companies, 8 Designers and Product Managers, other institutions and stakeholders. It is available online in the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLCRahLCYTg&t=769s

The Romanian seminar, Footwear for 21 Century – Design, Comfort and Sustainability, was held online in the period of 24-28 May 2021, being organised by partners Gheorghe Asachi Technical University and Activ Ortopedic. The participants (45) were students enrolled at university, designers and representatives of Romanian footwear companies. The seminar introduced the SciLED projects results and it addresses the following topics:
• Sustainable Strategies for the Design and Development of Footwear Products
• Improving the Comfort Characteristics of Footwear
• 3D / 2D CAD for Footwear
• Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Footwear Manufacturing
• Simulation and Evaluation of Footwear Behaviour.
Following the seminar, and combining with piloting phase on SciLED Academy with support of mentors and tutors from academia and companies, 11 students from TUIASI presented their projects for innovative, comfortable and sustainable footwear.

The SCILED Virtual Fab Lab is a virtual reality simulator of a footwear production company with 3D machines and tutorials that exemplify the production of a shoe. The SciLED Virtual Fab Lab is set up to facilitate the training activities based on team work by connecting trainers and trainees before running a physical internship/mobility training action. The Virtual Fab Lab replicates the physical lab of partner CTCP-Centro Tecnológico do Calçado de Portugal by simulating real situations, equipment and machinery for footwear prototyping. The SciLED Virtual Fab Lab app could be freely downloaded from the on Google Play, in order to be used with Google Cardboard VR glasses.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.virtualcampus.sciled

A version for Oculus VR glasses is available for registered users of the SciLED Academy, under the Virtual Fab Lab Module. It can also be obtained from the Oculus store.

In order to make the courses appealing to young students and to increase the training effectiveness, additional multimedia materials are developed, including: 1) Videos, 2) Guidelines for using computational tools, and 3) Companies’ best practices demonstrating the proper implementation of comfort and sustainability parameters in footwear design and product development stages. These additional learning tools are linked to the online courses and they are published in the SciLED Academy. A promotion video of the SciLED Knowledge Alliance is presented here (available on the Home Page).

The SciLED courses are presented in the audio&video lecture format, including additional training materials as course notes, videos and self-assignments/test quizzes. The SciLED Academy is developed to support the online tools and web – based material produced within the project. Based on the findings regarding the needs for innovative e-learning solutions both expressed by the surveyed business community and SciLED allied universities and having as an example of good practice the implemented solutions by top universities worldwide, the partners decided to give more substance to this task by developing not only simple online tools but a functional e-learning platform, titled SciLED Academy. This educational platform has four sections:
• Footwear performance and comfort
• Footwear sustainability
• Footwear design engineering
• Virtual Fab Lab
The e-learning content is accessible through user and password-based registration (to create an account) at http://academy.sciled.eu/login/signup.php

The SciLED training material addresses all types of footwear where comfort and sustainability have been identified as important requirements, and it is tailored to the needs of footwear designers and product managers. The training material is divided in three modules that fit in either a full course or seminar approach, and it is translated in RO, ES, PT, IT, GR. The complete modules are published as Course Notes on the SciLED Academy, accompanying the video lectures and being divided by Units and Lectures. They could be accessed upon registration/sign up on http://academy.sciled.eu/login/signup.php? , based on user and password.