One Degree high-performance sailing footwear

Program

MS 14 Graduate Industrial Design

In 2013, Italian-born Nina Viggi won a gold medal in the Industrial Designers Society of America’s prestigious International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition for her durable and protective One Degree High Performance Dinghy Shoe, designed as part of her Grad ID thesis project. To ensure that the design for her innovative sailing shoe would be competitive, Viggi worked on site with Hong Kong manufacturers. Following graduation, after an internship at Continuum, she became an interaction designer at global design consultancy Teague, and an interaction designer at GE Software, before moving into the position of product design lead at Capital One. Viggi is now a user experience designer with Uber in the San Francisco Bay area and co-founder of a new venture, The Italian Collective, an online tailoring service for women only, specializing in “bespoke” clothing that has been handmade in Italy.