Abstract: The Art of Design

I probably think about feet

a lot more than the average person.

As a shoe designer, I have to.

Our feet were made to walk, and run and climb once in a while.

Bare feet can be great at all of that.

But what the modern athlete asks of their feet

is far beyond what they were originally designed to do.

My job is to think about how to make these very capable natural instruments

perform even better.

That's Tinker Hatfield!

Y'all serious? That's Tink.

Tinker Hatfield?

He's a legend!

Is that the dude that created Jordans?

In the '80s, Tinker Hatfield started to define

what working with an athlete was all about.

It was a relationship with the athlete,

really digging in, getting to know them as athletes.

Ultimately, it's about performance.

But there's so many more layers on top of that.

Tinker is a mad scientist.

He came from pole vaulting.

When I played the game, it was about jumping,

so, I mean, it was easy to find that synergy

and a great complement between the two of us.

What we did as a team was we were able to build a product that sustained time.

It catered to the athlete at the highest level

to the point where they still can play in that same shoe,

thirty years later.

Well, that was crappy.

I never used to think about design.

I was always focused on being an athlete.

In high school, I won some state championships,

and I even received a full athletic scholarship

to the University of Oregon,

where I met an enormously influential man by the name of Bill Bowerman.

Coach, I'd be interested in your reaction

in participating in the coaching of these world-class athletes.

First, Hal, call me Bill.

Remember, I don't like to be called coach. I am sensitive about that.

Okay.

His real title that he liked was Teacher of Competitive Response.

He was trying to help people learn how to win.

He is also one of the two founders of Nike.

So when I came here, he was designing Nike running shoes and track spikes.

He was liable to do and try anything to make his athletes better.

He used to have a little cobbler shop right underneath the grandstands.

If you weren't careful,

he might just pop out of that cobbler shop and grab you by the scruff of the shirt

and tell you to try on these shoes and run around the track.

Sometimes they would be great,

and sometimes you would come back bleeding.

One of my events was the pole vault,

and Bill believed that I had the potential to be a national champion,

and even become an Olympian.

Pole-vaulting is fraught with all kinds of danger.

If you don't have a real strong sense of

"I'm committing to doing this, and I'm doing it,"

you can get really hurt.

In order to deal with that, you have to kind of just go for it.

You have to have this mentality,

like you're going to just blow through a wall.

You can't back off.

Your goal is to somehow get upside down and fly through the air and go over.

There is a moment where you are flying.

You sort of wake up, and you go, "Wow."

My sophomore year, I fell from about 17 feet on an uneven surface

and tore my ankle in half.

Required five surgeries and two years of rehabilitation.

I was pretty depressed,

laying in the hospital that night

overhearing the doctors talking about "This kid's career is over."

There was no way

that most of the coaching staff felt like I was ever gonna contribute

to the track team again.

What was really great though, for me,

wasn't anything that Bill Bowerman said, it was what he did.

Bill would build me special track spikes that had a heel lift on one side

because I was limping.

That all added to my ability to be a problem solver for other people,

because I understand the consequences of injury.

He protected me from being just dismissed from the team and losing my scholarship.

I had no idea how much work a discipline like Architecture would be.

The good news was that I found out that I could draw

and it was almost by accident.

That was a pretty big surprise.

This took a long time to draw, I'll tell you that.

Look at all that little... That was with a Rapidograph...

And those little tiny marks...

During my college years in Architecture school here,

I also was doing some work for Bill Bowerman.

We came across an actual drawing that I did

of an early design for one of the very early Nike track spikes.

I just wouldn't just, like, tell him what I thought,

I would also draw and write down

some of my, I guess you could say, interpretations of his design.

In this case, he asked me to try out some track spikes he was working with...

and they didn't work.

They actually unscrewed themselves every time I would go and train in them.

Unbeknownst to all of us, I was learning, I guess,

how to design shoes and solve problems for athletes right off the bat.

Go look at the feet of a pro-athlete who's played basketball for ten years.

They're trashed, because their shoes are too tight.

They tie their shoes so tight because they need them tight,

but they stay that way throughout all their practices and all their games,

and their feet become deformed and damaged and sometimes it incapacitates them.

Our studies tell us that if you take better care of your feet

and get better blood flow, a better fit and better comfort,

you actually play better.

If you're standing around for a free throw,

wouldn't it be great if your shoes loosened up and let your...

Let the blood flow back into your feet

and gave your feet a little bit of a rest?

And as soon as the person shoots the free throw, the shoes know it?

They know you're going to start moving quickly

and they "zzzim" back up again.

You go sit on the bench. Why would you leave your shoes tight?

They would just go "zzzz..." They would relax.

That's when I started E.A.R.L.

E. A. R. L. Electro Adaptive Reactive Lacing.

The first person I talked to about it was really developer Tiffany Beers,

to see if we could even entertain the idea of starting a project like this.

What did you say?

Well, I said I wasn't sure

because I didn't report to him.

And so I went and talked to my managers.

They said, "You don't say no to Tinker. Yeah, you just took the project.

If he asked you, you're taking it."

We started to focus primarily on the mechanism.

Like, how do we tighten the laces?

How do we get it small enough that it's performance and it still looks good?

I think this is a whole new product design

that will be part of the future.

I think there's art involved in design.

But to me, I don't think of it as art.

My perception of art is that it's really

the ultimate self-expression from a creative individual.

For me as a designer,

it is not the ultimate goal to become self-expressive.

The end goal is to solve a problem for someone else,

and hopefully it looks great to someone else

and it's cool to someone else.

This is how design works for me.

I started drawing space.

I was really just trying to reflect my mood at the time.

I started to have a little bit of fun with the actual planets

and put faces on them and...

I put George Jetsen.

You know, I have a Volkswagen Bus,

Porsche Speedster, peace symbols and fingers.

I don't even know why I am doing this, I'm just doing it.

I drew a cheetah foot that's actually embedded inside of a sneaker.

And I'm kind of moving through from that first page of space.

Now I'm getting more specific about innovation in general.

I remember somebody telling me it'd be great

if Nike could do shoes that were invisible and I drew the Invisible Man.

This is just all stuff that's coming to my head

and I'm just sketching.

All of this stuff ended up in a drawing of a shoe.

A stream of consciousness can lead you some place.

You may not even know where you're headed,

but somehow you end up somewhere, and here I ended up with a shoe.

Today at Nike, we know even more.

We developed one of the most sophisticated sport research labs in the world.

Nike had grown up very fast.

We were leading the industry,

focused on basketball and running.

Reebok came along, there was this aerobics craze.

Reebok invented aerobics shoes. It was a whole new thing.

They had the right product at the right time,

and they actually passed Nike in size.

So there was a bit of a panic and Nike was laying people off right and left.

They were also thinking that they needed to upgrade their design group.

So, I was invited to be a part of a 24-hour design contest.

Tinker wasn't a shoe designer at the time.

He was designing trade shows and displays and retail.

I worked the whole 24 hours. I didn't go to bed that night.

Most of the other designers,

I think, just tried to work off of what they were already doing,

and it wasn't really anything very unique in terms of storytelling.

I came back in with a big presentation,

sort of having fun with the fact that this was the perfect shoe

to ride a motor scooter in.

And then get out and then jog around and walk around a little bit.

Two days after the competition,

I was... I wasn't even asked,

I was told that I was now a footwear designer for Nike.

In a very short period of time, I pretty much became the lead designer.

One of my very first projects was the Air Max.

I felt like this was an opportunity to think way differently.

Nike was encapsulating gas inside a urethane airbag

for a cushioning component.

I thought, "Let's make the bag a little bit wider, make sure it's stable,

but then let's remove part of the midsole, so we actually see it."

The closest you'd come to anything before that was, I remember as a kid,

seeing Elton John having high-heeled shoes with a goldfish inside of them.

Right? I mean, it was simply, like, very... punk even.

I had gone to Paris

and seen a very controversial and loved or mostly hated building,

The Georges Pompidou Center, designed by Renzo Piano.