“Craft” isn’t quite the word one naturally associates with an international megabrand like Nike, particularly when they put on events such as the Flyknit Experience which debuted at Station Kreuzberg, Berlin, on February 20. which, with its 1,000m illuminated running track, could be a kind of “sports disco”, or a nightclub for amateur athletes whose stimulant of choice is the endorphins produced by hard physical exercise. Yet, there’s a link: that day we spoke to Nike’s highly amiable Head of Innovation, Ben Shaffer (pictured, with his impressive beard) about the focus of this intriguing neo-psychedelic event, which was the launch of the new Flyknit Lunar 1+ running shoe. This “paradigm-shifting” shoe’s uniqueness is the woven upper, which was originally launched last year and now comes with the brand’s other key recent innovation, the Lunar sole.
“Who would have thought that a sweater could be a shoe?” Shaffer said. True, it’s a strange thought: the point about Flyknit is that it is knitted from yarn rather sewn together from pieces cut from rolls of material. It offers a range of benefits to runners, some of whom, at the projects genesis, were calling for a shoe that was like a sock: body-formed, supple and ultralight. In the development of the Flyknit, Shaffer explained, he and his team looking into knitting, and an age-old technology, even if we think of it as more if a grandmother-ish craft.
“Talking to people with a background in knitting, we saw what we could do and it blew us away,” Shaffer said. “When craftsmen and engineers mash with product design people, it opens up huge tearrains for segment. It’s changed my perspective on design, how you can be simple in a craft, but then have so much unique coplexity within that. It’s very pure.”
Nike is known for its leading-edge industrial design – the avant-garde of performance products – but it seems that as with plenty of other designers and creatives at the moment, an affection for the processes of crafts is merging with the possibilities of advanced product engineering in this project: “getting analogue” in the company’s famed Innovation Kitchen was how Shaffer termed it.
“We often think we’re inventing things, but it’s really about bing smart and matching things,” he concluded. “The best product design are where someone with a good eye for composition meets a craftsman.”
Read plenty more about the current crafts boom in the next issue of Sleek, out next month.