MO/GO Pants with Exoskeleton by Arc'teryx + Skip

over the past 30 years the design team at arteric have created a really long list of innovations that have changed the entire outdoor industry and while their latest project aims to help more

people enjoy the outdoors I don't even have the words something they've been working at since day one this product does that in a whole new way there's no way I can do this without these I would

take one look at this Weir [Music] deep in the heart of the arteric design center sits the advanced concepts team they use their diverse skill set to solve problems that most people aren't

even thinking about yet and find the next gamechanging Innovation for Arters we're not too far from startup or that kind of entrepreneurial Spirit where we're really just looking to get sort of deep rooted Innovation and culture here

this is Cam he's not a designer I'm actually a biomechanical engineer 4 years ago cam received an email from Catherine and Anna they were working at Google's Innovation Center called x on a

wearable device to help with mobility in the mountains sort of like an ebike for hiking Anna and Katherine's team evolved into skip a 12p person startup in San Francisco we were kind of grappling with

who is this thing actually going to be for and we found time and time again that those are people who used to be incredibly active in the outdoors and over time for many different reasons that sort of started to go movement is

so core to The Human Experience so we really motivated to help keep people experiencing physical activity and that will hopefully help keep their long-term mental and physical health really strong

the skip team wanted to build something like an exoskeleton historically those have been for Enterprise or medical uses and so they're super good at doing a very specific thing in a very specific setting but as soon as it kind of hits

the real world it doesn't do so good it needed to be smaller and smarter something that could handle variable real world terrain but how does it actually work

our device uses sensors and machine learning to understand how you're trying to move and predict the support that you need their first tests were challenging but promising we built some of these

early prototypes that functioned really really well such a difference but they didn't look great we realized we needed help making into a product that people would wear

and love every day and so we were looking for a partner who had the technical expertise to take it from concept to reality and that's exactly the kind of problem the arteric advanced

concepts team loves to solve the fact that ourter had an in-house design an R&D team was huge we actually realized how uncommon that is in the space the opportunity for ourter

is take this thing that's definitely a little crude and make something that really like has an emotional attachment when we first saw the design it was really intimidating cuz we don't do robotics we don't do machine learning

but when you unpack the problem it was really familiar to us you're looking at users that want to get outside and really see them light up when they understand that this could really help them overcome obstacles or achieve

goals early on cam brought in Dana design developer at arct she is the type of person who customizes everything made a custom glove cuff wedding dresses

backpack did make my own Fair mountain bike pants cuz I wasn't able to find those in the industry that I liked the fit of to figure out what they needed to make Cam and Dana did what they do best

ask big questions like how do you fit an exoskeleton into a pair of technical hiking pants luckily it turned out a lot of the solutions to new problems could be found

in Old problems we've really leveraged the experience in the building and a lot of the technologies that we've worked so hard to develop like using the method arteric invented in the 9s to shape a hip belt on a pack or a leg loop on a

harness and then applying that same method to create cuffs that can support bulky electronics and still fit comfortably around a person's leg having to fit gear under a piece of apparel is

not necessarily new for Arters you know we have to make our pants that fit over a ski boot and we know a lot about how something hard is going to abraid

against the back of a material but the parts that were unknown was kind of introducing Electronics into that arct and Skip worked in Sprints for weeks at a time that you only have that much surface

area refining and tweaking there's one and refining some more yeah can't you see it's going really well producing some really out

there prototypes eventually the teams were ready for the next big step taking the Prototype from here to here I think the chief is the best Muse

for this because it's not easy I think there's a lot of people that aspire to do it and then it obviously being local and there's a lot of technicality to that hike and you know empowerment

feeling when you get to the top turns out combining hard Goods soft goods engineering machine learning and then taking all that up the chief creates some challenges when we first climbed

the chief with the device I think we broke like three of the 3D printed plastic parts we had done we've had times where we're halfway up the chief and one of the legs of the device stops working I think getting it out of the

design center really helped fail fast and and iterate one of the things they learned testers wanted to use this like a heavy backpack you wear it when you

need it you take it off when you don't so the team asked what if we made the motors at the knee removable and because every element of this product is so

interconnected that decision started a domino effect it's a bit of a roller coaster I think disappointing and then it's a little daunting but then I think something is really impacting the user

experience in a meaningful way that then it doesn't matter that it's going to have those Domino effects so the team got to work how are you actually going to attach it to the leg affect the pant fit it would affect the pant exits that

it went through it would affect how long our cables needed to be the Cuffs had to change cuz they're receiving the lateral structure and take the old machine learning models transfer them to all

this new data days of just grinding building iterating feeling yeah it turns out that this is really complicated it's incredibly difficult to kind of fit

a product into somebody's life I think we were able to find that adversity and stare at it straight in the face and you know come back to the drawing board Sprint after Sprint the two teams

iterated refined and redefined everything leading to a fully functional scalable and revolutionary Innovation

the MoGo by arteric and skip the big questions had finally been answered but the why had always been clear it's kind of crazy I can

definitely feel it it's like you think you have to deliver a certain amount of force and it just helps you yeah it feels good a little different no it feels good to be doing this we've been so deep in the weeds getting to step out

of that and see how impactful this is for people is extremely emotional I mean honestly getting to see how this actually impacts somebody's life like so deeply I feel like you and I have talked about going going into surgery of like

am I going to be able to do the things I loved doing since hard surgery it wasn't even a matter of life and death it was just like there's all these things that kind of make up my life and have something like this and just know that

you can kind of return to doing what you love is pretty powerful that's good you no so Trish when was the last time you hiked the chief up here yeah you said it

was like 20 20 years ago I didn't think I would do it again and here I am there you go here I am it's the core of our Human Experience walking around moving your body connecting with other people through

shared experiences and so I think at the end of the day what we're striving for is making it feel like it's not a complex technical product and making it feel as simple as approachable as human

as possible so that's the MoGo 4 years in the making coming soon to help more people go further in the mountains

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