Art Streiber
Dan Saelinger

HOW NIKE BUILT THE REAL POWER-LACING SNEAKER OF OUR DREAMS.

by Scott Eden

The Sneaker should come alive. Tinker Hatfield was sitting at a drafting table in his office in Beaverton, Oregon. He and another young designer at Nike named Mark Parker had just returned from a brainstorming session in Hollywood with film director Robert Zemeckis, who was storyboarding the sequel to his sci-fi comedy hit of three years earlier, Back to the Future. It was 1988, and Zemeckis and his creative team were on the hunt for futuristic sight gags for the film, set in 2015. They had tasked Hatfield and Parker with dreaming up some seriously 21st-century sneakers. One idea that came up in the meeting involved magnetic levitation, but to Hatfield that seemed a little too Jetsons.

October 2016. Subscribe to WIRED.
October 2016. Subscribe to WIRED.
Tinker Hatfield
Dan Saelinger

His time as a pole-vaulter and his degree in architecture from the University of Oregon had taught him to prize utility, and it didn’t seem plausible to him that any athlete, even decades in the future, would ever want or need to levitate. Hatfield and Parker decided to treat the assignment not as a sight gag but, as he recalls, “like someone had asked me to reinvent footwear for actual performance reasons, in the real world, only I had 30 years to figure the technology out.” And that’s when the idea came to him: “What about a shoe that would essentially come alive when you put it on? It would sense you. It would become the shape of your foot, and when it came alive it would light up. Wouldn’t it be great if shoes could do that?”

Hatfield didn’t just sketch what such a shoe would look like. He drew a storyboard in which Marty McFly first encounters a pair of sneakers: He steps in, reaches down to tie the laces—an instinctual, ritual bowing down to the shoe—and the sneakers light up, come alive, and shape to his foot. (Hatfield says he even included a snippet of McFly dialog—something like Wow! Power laces!) A scene similar to Hatfield’s drawing wound up in the movie, which became one of the highest-grossing films of the year and introduced the Nike Mag, as the shoe was christened, as something like the flying car of footwear—a sci-fi promise that nobody could figure out how to deliver on. Over time, the Mag would so capture people’s imaginations that an intense campaign resulted in online petitions, with futurists, fanboys, and sneakerheads pleading with Nike to create a retail version.

Nike’s Sneaker Gurus Demonstrate the HyperAdapt

Hatfield, Parker, and an army of designers, engineers, and data scientists were listening. And after 28 years of brainstorming and 11 years of R&D, after many false starts, delays, and blown deadlines, after the vanquishing of internal skepticism, after innumerable prototypes, iterations, and redesigns, Nike’s automatic electronic self-lacing shoe is scheduled to ship to stores this holiday season. The company is calling the technology “adaptive fit,” and the sneaker is the HyperAdapt 1.0—each shoe has a sensor, battery, motor, and cable system that adjusts fit based on an algorithmic pressure equation. When a foot is inserted, the shoe tightens automatically until it senses friction points. There are a pair of buttons near the tongue to adjust fit as needed. That such high tech shoes, with a likely (though still TBD) high price tag to match, would be desirable in a country that spends billions a year on sneakers was almost taken for granted. That Hatfield, now Nike’s vice president of creative concepts and probably the world’s most celebrated designer of shoes, a human icon inside a corporate one, would lead the team behind them was only expected. And while no one will say how much the company has spent on the shoe’s development—“a considerable amount of R&D dollars” is as specific as Parker, now the company’s CEO, will get—Hatfield believes the HyperAdapt is the first step in a revolution in adaptive footwear and thus worth every red cent. “We’re talking about a project that’s maybe the most difficult in the history of footwear,” Hatfield says. “I’m more excited about this than any project I’ve ever been involved with.”

Related Stories

For Tinker Hatfield, the idea of a self-lacing shoe is of a piece with technologies like the Internet of Things or self-driving cars.
SCROLL DOWN

For Tinker Hatfield, the idea of a self-lacing shoe is of a piece with technologies like the Internet of Things or self-driving cars. Art Streiber

Mia Hamm looks from the outside like the sleek headquarters of a very rich pharmaceuticals company. All the major corporate structures on the Nike campus in Beaverton are named after the company’s most famous sponsored stars—there’s the John McEnroe, the Michael Jordan, the Tiger Woods, the Bo Jackson—and though the Mia Hamm Building rises a mere four stories aboveground, it’s home to a cavernous basement level that is suggestive of bunkers, classified military research installations, and villains’ lairs. The building is off-limits to the overwhelming majority of Nike employees and the totality of everyone else, and its top-secret nature is owed to the fact that it contains Nike’s most advanced R&D labs, its sneaker-prototype-fabrication skunkworks, its state-of-the-art materials-testing rooms, its biomechanics labs, and the experimental concept-shoe atelier that the company has dubbed the Innovation Kitchen in homage to Nike’s origin story. (In 1970, the head coach of the University of Oregon track team, Bill Bowerman, poured melted urethane into a waffle iron in the kitchen of his Eugene home in the hopes of creating a better sole for the shoes worn by his runners. The following year, the small imported-sneaker business he had started in 1964 with one of his former milers, Phil Knight, became Nike Inc.) Rising above the reception desk is an enormous sculpture, extending three stories into the atrium and composed of hundreds of plastic rods that spell out an exhortation: always listen to the voice of the athlete. The words, attributed to Knight, echo throughout the building, silk-screened onto walls in conspicuous, high-traffic areas and serving as an ever-present visible mantra for the designers toiling within: Solve a performance problem for an athlete and you’ve got yourself a shoe.

A quote attributed to Nike founder Phil Knight greets visitors to the company’s Mia Hamm Building.A quote attributed to Nike founder Phil Knight greets visitors to the company’s Mia Hamm Building.Art Streiber

Inside the Kitchen, Hatfield’s desk sits at the terminus of a narrow corridor-like space, at least 75 yards long, that stretches the length of a curvilinear wall of windows. The area around his desk is a visual reminder of his exalted status at Nike: An enormous drawing of Michael Jordan hangs on the wall behind him, and 31 pairs of Air Jordans—the series for which he’s most famous—are strung on a rod along a nearby window. He sits surrounded by all of the Kitchen’s top designers and engineers, some perched at high drafting tables. Pinned to a bulletin board nearby are what appear to be blueprints for shoes of radical weirdness, and prototypes are piled on desks and spilling onto the floors. Exotic socklike things. Track shoes that look like Victorian witches’ boots. An orange shoe-shaped object webbed a little sadistically with high-tensile cords. Foot forms (mannequin feet, basically) are everywhere, lending the Kitchen a podiatric atmosphere. A large open space adjacent to the designers’ area is filled with rows of high tech sewing machines, injection-molding devices, and laser cutters. There are spools of thread the size of footballs and enormous drawer units containing swatches of synthetic textiles. A few of the sewing machines have been modified so that they can sew with carbon fiber. This part of the Kitchen is where a specialized team of “concept creators” works its magic, fabricating prototypes basically by hand, taking shoe designs from 2-D to 3-D. It brings to mind the workshop of some kind of futuristic cobbler, which is not so far off. (I’m one of the few journalists ever admitted to the facility, and I’m under strict orders not to photograph—or even, it sometimes seems, commit to memory—any of the designs I might accidentally catch sight of on someone’s computer screen, or sitting around on desks in prototype form.)

1 5 Just as the characters in Wall-E, which helped inspire the design of the shoe, had acronyms for names, the HyperAdapt has its own nickname: E.A.R.L. It stands for Electro Adaptive Reactive Lacing.Dan Saelinger

2 5 The blue segment in the midsole lights up for a few seconds when the lacing engine is engaged.Dan Saelinger

3 5 Dan Saelinger

4 5 The “laces” are really nylon bands that perceptibly contract and expand as the shoes tighten or loosen.Dan Saelinger

5 5 LEDs on the heelcap light up when the lacing engine is engaged and radiate to reflect whether the shoe is being tightened or loosened.Dan Saelinger

1 5 Just as the characters in Wall-E, which helped inspire the design of the shoe, had acronyms for names, the HyperAdapt has its own nickname: E.A.R.L. It stands for Electro Adaptive Reactive Lacing.Dan Saelinger
2 5 The blue segment in the midsole lights up for a few seconds when the lacing engine is engaged.Dan Saelinger
3 5 Dan Saelinger
4 5 The “laces” are really nylon bands that perceptibly contract and expand as the shoes tighten or loosen.Dan Saelinger
5 5 LEDs on the heelcap light up when the lacing engine is engaged and radiate to reflect whether the shoe is being tightened or loosened.Dan Saelinger
Lead Image For Current Gallery
Second Image For Current Gallery Third Image For Current Gallery
5
Fourth Image For Current Gallery

The desk immediately to Hatfield’s left belongs to Tiffany Beers, a senior innovator at the company and the engineer largely responsible for figuring out how to make adaptive fit a reality. She is 36 years old and a former collegiate volleyball player who looks positively Portlandia in black jeans and dark brown hair streaked with gray and blue dye. Hired by Nike in 2004 to develop new air bags for the company’s ubiquitous sole-cushioning technology, she quickly became known for her tenacity and talent, and after less than a year on the job, she was approached by Hatfield with a special assignment. For 17 years, he explained, ever since their Back to the Future brainstorming sessions in 1988, he and Parker had been giving deep thought to how athletic shoes ought to advance, and they’d come up with a set of ideas they dubbed “adaptable performance.” It was, Parker says, the “next phase of performance”—athletic footwear that could sense the presence of a foot and trigger a motor to tighten or loosen the shoe.

nike_PQ_1.svg

The thinking was rooted in enhancing athletes’ abilities and protecting their bodies. “Most of the athletes we observe—scientifically and otherwise—their feet are ruined,” Hatfield says, reclining in a love seat near his desk, his curly gray hair frothing up professorially and his pole-vaulter’s physique more or less intact at 64. “Here’s a thing that I believe, and I think it’s been scientifically proven: If your feet are not healthy, there’s kind of a chain reaction, and your entire body can get out of whack.” Take pro basketball players, he says: “If you’re playing for three hours, there might be only an hour of it when you actually need your sneakers tight. The rest of the time, when you’re standing around for free throws, jump balls, sitting on the bench, you should loosen your shoes up.” But NBA players don’t do that, he explains—“so day after day after day they’re torturing their feet, and they’re becoming less and less healthy.” This was a performance problem, Hatfield reasoned, that required an engineering and design solution. By 2005, with interest in the Nike Mag still pulsing, he and Parker believed that technology had advanced enough to make adaptable performance a reality.

Tiffany Beers in the Winnebago-cum-meeting-area inside the Innovation Kitchen. She had to become an expert in motors and batteries to engineer the HyperAdapt.
SCROLL DOWN

Tiffany Beers in the Winnebago-cum-meeting-area inside the Innovation Kitchen. She had to become an expert in motors and batteries to engineer the HyperAdapt. Art Streiber

Beers, ambitious and energized by the call from the resident guru, set off on the project, with Hatfield and the other designers largely taking a backseat. This is how a project generally works at Nike: The heavy design work doesn’t commence until the engineering is mostly worked out. There was no deadline for Beers and no budget. To start she paid a visit to Nike’s enormous archives—run by a former Nike shoe designer who had also been a curator at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry—and had him pull the original Nike Mag. The prop itself did not have an auto-lacing mechanism—in the movie, special-effects people constructed a platform, and under it several crewmembers lay on their backs and pulled a series of wires, invisible to the camera, that were attached to the shoes on Michael J. Fox’s feet. Beers also discovered that the lights in the shoe were electroluminescent and therefore electro-hungry. On the set, Fox had to carry a battery pack the size of a transistor radio in his back pocket, allowing the letters NIKE to light up in fluorescent blue on the Mag high-tops.

nike

Something like cold fear ran through Beers as she considered how to embed a powerful enough battery into a lightweight, streamlined sneaker. “I’m like, they want me to stick this in there? And add auto-lacing? Are they crazy?” She called any company she could think of that manufactured very small motors. She spoke with model-train people, medical-device people. The motor would be used to pull the laces tight—the “lace engine,” as Beers and her team would come to call this mechanism. She flew to Europe and Asia to attend industry conferences and trade shows. She became an expert in batteries. With the help of a mechanical engineer, she devised a rudimentary fit system, the cabling that would take the place of shoelaces in the sneaker. She breadboarded the electrical component systems she would need and had the Kitchen’s cobblers stitch up actual shoes into which she could insert them. Trial followed error and was repeated.

It took two years, but by 2007, Beers had a full-blown prototype to show Parker and Hatfield—though there were, she recalls, a few issues. For one thing, the sneakers were huge and rigid and basically unwearable; they looked as though someone had watched Back to the Future Part II and drawn the Nike Mags from memory as a cartoon. For another, you had to plug the things into a socket with an AC adapter—permanently. They could not hold a charge. Also, owing to the size and mass of the motor, similar in both measures to a roll of quarters, the shoe was heavy and loud. “It sounded like you were in a dentist’s office,” Beers says. “And it closed … very slowly. And it opened … very slowly. But we proved we could do it.” (Her efforts resulted in US Patent 8,046,937, in which “an article of footwear with an automatic lacing system is disclosed.”)

Nike fabricates 3-D models using machines like this heel former.Nike fabricates 3-D models using machines like this heel former.Art Streiber
Nike’s concept creators work with loose soles to produce new shoe prototypes.Nike’s concept creators work with loose soles to produce new shoe prototypes.Art Streiber
Bolts of synthetic textiles on hand for cobbling together the possible next big thing in sneakers.Bolts of synthetic textiles on hand for cobbling together the possible next big thing in sneakers.Art Streiber
Nike’s innovative sneakerheads have an amazing array of materials to choose from.Nike’s innovative sneakerheads have an amazing array of materials to choose from.Art Streiber

It would take another five years of prototyping and iterating before a wave of technological advances combined to give the auto-lacing mechanics any real momentum. (In the meantime, Nike would release limited-edition, movie-replica, light-up, non-auto-lacing shoes in 2011, auctioning them off to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Neat trick but, without any performance-enhancing cred, well short of the finish line.) By late 2013, Beers and her team discovered a high-speed, lightweight micromotor that proved far more durable than even its manufacturer initially believed. To make it work with the shoe’s cabling system, the Nike team adjusted the gearing inside the motor’s off-the-shelf box. She sourced a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery that packed enough juice to power both the motor and the LEDs in the heel that light up when the cable system activates. (Your shoes are now yet another power-hungry device that requires plugging in—a full charge, Beers says, takes three hours and typically lasts about two weeks.) And for the cables that would tighten and loosen the shoe, she experimented with Kevlar and other high-performance materials before deciding that standard 200-pound-test fishing line provided the most strength and the least friction.

After years of slow progress, Beers was growing cautiously optimistic, and Hatfield was feeling bullish. In February 2014, as he was partaking in Nike festivities at the NBA All-Star weekend, Hatfield announced to reporters that the company would have an auto-lacing shoe ready … the following year! In 2015! Just like in the movie! Headlines ensued. Beers was blindsided. Nothing about the project’s status suggested the sneakers would be ready in a year’s time, and though Hatfield insists he wasn’t trying to light a fire under his team—no Jobsian reality-distortion fields here—the degree of epinephrine shock Beers experienced is still hard for her to articulate.

Still, she did not panic. She commandeered a section of the Kitchen, erected four foam-core partitions, brought her team of six engineers into this enclosure, and told everyone else to stay out. Need-to-know. They called it the Black Hole. It was a top-secret skunkworks inside a top-secret skunkworks. For six weeks, day after day, 12 and 13 hours a day, they made the final push, with Beers borrowing two key structural elements from recent Nike creations to reach the finish line. First she turned to the Jordan 28, a 2012 Hatfield cocreation that was designed with a sizable gap in its sole; into this highway underpass, Beers figured, she could insert the lacing engine without interrupting the sneaker’s silhouette. Then she took advantage of a 2014 breakthrough called Flyweave, in which a shoe’s upper is woven entirely out of soft, pliable polyester. The cables that were needed to tighten and fasten the HyperAdapt could be embedded into this woven upper, and the smooth polyester reduced friction, which in turn reduced stress on the motor. “Everything kind of came together all at once,” Beers says. The design work could finally begin.

1 5 Coming in 2017, the VaporMax is the next major addition to Nike’s AIR line.Dan Saelinger

2 5 The VaporMax sole consists exclusively of discrete, flexible air pockets.Dan Saelinger

3 5 The shoe is the newest in the Air Max line, which debuted in 1987 with Hatfield’s iconic Max 1s.Dan Saelinger

4 5 After years of working to deliver more visible air and more cushioning, Nike Air designer Kathy Gomez sees the new shoe as a paradigm shift.Dan Saelinger

5 5 “Maybe more air isn’t better,” Gomez says. “Let’s put air only where we need it, and let’s redefine the sensation of air.”Dan Saelinger

1 5 Coming in 2017, the VaporMax is the next major addition to Nike’s AIR line.Dan Saelinger
2 5 The VaporMax sole consists exclusively of discrete, flexible air pockets.Dan Saelinger
3 5 The shoe is the newest in the Air Max line, which debuted in 1987 with Hatfield’s iconic Max 1s.Dan Saelinger
4 5 After years of working to deliver more visible air and more cushioning, Nike Air designer Kathy Gomez sees the new shoe as a paradigm shift.Dan Saelinger
5 5 “Maybe more air isn’t better,” Gomez says. “Let’s put air only where we need it, and let’s redefine the sensation of air.”Dan Saelinger
Lead Image For Current Gallery
Second Image For Current Gallery Third Image For Current Gallery
5
Fourth Image For Current Gallery

Hatfield’s process, he says, is often a kind of visual stream of consciousness or free-association exercise wherein he just starts sketching whatever pops into his mind. He’ll fill page after page with weird cartoons and phantasmagoria and bits of architecture and narrative sequences resembling the storyboards of some lush videogame. At first he couldn’t get past his original design of the Mag, and he ended up tossing his first few sketches out of frustration. “More and more, I was like, man, get away from that shoe! That’s been done!” he says. As they often do with design projects, Hatfield and Parker passed sketches back and forth, drawing over each other’s work and scrawling notes in the margins. Parker, the former designer, is an unusual Fortune 200 CEO in that he rolls up his sleeves and does what he was originally trained to do, which in his case is design. Among other things, he helped jar Hatfield out of his Mag rut by suggesting that they jettison the idea of making it a high-top. He also produced a sketch with a kind of command written in all-caps in the margin: make “power laces” more of the hero.

Hatfield went back to his sketch pad; out of his brain and onto the page fell the male and female robots from Pixar’s computer-animated film Wall-E, an exotic blue-green luminescent butterfly that is part of an insect collection displayed on a wall in Parker’s office, and the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star. “The Chuck Taylor, there’s an iconic logo on the side, but otherwise it’s unadorned,” he says. “And I felt like this first HyperAdapt effort from Nike should be like a new-wave Chuck Taylor, because someday we’re going to look back at this and it will be as archaic as the Chuck Taylor is now.” These loose imaginings started to take shape in what would become the HyperAdapt’s ultimate design: The shoe is mostly black, white, or gray, for starters, and along the tongue are what appear to be laces but aren’t—not exactly. They’re nylon bands that perceptibly contract and expand as the shoes tighten or loosen. These “laces” serve as a visual cue so that wearers can tell, by sight in addition to feel, just how taut or slack each shoe is. On the shoe’s sides, there is a muted galaxy of blue-green pixels (shades of the luminescent butterfly) clustered over the cables, the better to draw attention to the fit system. And there is a blue orb, inspired by the female robot in Wall-E, implanted in the midsole that lights up momentarily when the lacing engine is engaged. (To minimize the power suck, the LEDs dim after six seconds.) All of this was an effort to design for the shoe’s functionality. That’s what would excite people about the HyperAdapt, Hatfield and Parker believed. That’s how they would sell it.

Nike CEO Mark Parker is a well-known and multifarious collector of objets and fine art, and everything in his office—from the Tiffany lamp on his desk to sprinter Michael Johnson’s gold shoes in the foreground to the Mark Ryden paintings on the wall—informs his design work.
SCROLL DOWN

Nike CEO Mark Parker is a well-known and multifarious collector of objets and fine art, and everything in his office—from the Tiffany lamp on his desk to sprinter Michael Johnson’s gold shoes in the foreground to the Mark Ryden paintings on the wall—informs his design work. Art Streiber

Every now and then the Nike brass convene in the Innovation Kitchen for what amounts to a high-stakes game of show-and-tell. Designers and engineers bring the prototypes for projects they’re working on, and top executives will consult, criticize, and question their progress. In January 2015, the HyperAdapt team brought their latest iteration into one of the Kitchen’s conference rooms. Beers, who’d been working nonstop since Hatfield’s NBA All-Star bombshell, had finally taken a vacation, and assuming her place was Eric Avar, another heralded Nike designer and Hatfield protégé, best known for his designs bearing Kobe Bryant’s name. As Avar wrapped up his presentation, the panel began eviscerating the entire project. They questioned just about everything. At bottom, Beers says, they doubted that the shoe had any real athletic benefit. Even more terrifying, they were unsure whether work on it should even continue. (Skepticism was and is hardly limited to inside Nike—in the wider industry, gimmick is a word that gets thrown around, and the Reebok Pump is sometimes dismissively referenced. “I look at it as more of a PR thing, not as true innovation,” says Peter Rueegger, a leading footwear-industry consultant who has worked with Nike in the past. And Mike Friton, a former Nike designer who worked closely with Beers on the project in its early stages around 2007, questions the environmental impact and sustainability of a shoe packed with electronics. “To me, it was kind of running backward in that sense.”)

nike_PQ_1.svg

When she returned, Beers once again did not panic. The panel’s feedback coaxed her team to focus on improving the HyperAdapt’s basic proposition: It could help protect athletes’ feet, and that, in turn, could help the athletes feel better and play better. “I was like, OK, we have to build more prototypes,” Beers says. “We have to have more people try it out, we have to prove it with numbers. We have to put the proof on the table.” With the help of Nike Sports Research Lab, a testing facility that measures human performance and collects data to shape the design and engineering, she conducted multiple rounds of what’s internally called perception testing. Beers put HyperAdapt prototypes on test subjects and had them go through a kind of CrossFit training routine, and after their workouts they answered surveys about their shoe experience. She also stepped up dynamic wear testing, where she asked runners and basketball players to wear the shoes and give her feedback on how their feet felt during and after their workouts. With new data in hand, Beers added sole cushioning and rejiggered the fit system so the lacing harnesses hugged less on the toes and more on the foot’s midsection, and subjects reported less wear and tear on their feet after intensive workouts. Six months later, with a new launch target of 2016 in mind, she presented a new HyperAdapt prototype to the Kitchen’s evaluation panel. The skeptics were satisfied.

A pair of HyperAdapts materializes in front of me. It’s late July in Beaverton, and these are samples, late-stage prototypes—Beers is even now testing and making tweaks to the shoe’s internal workings. She is currently wearing a pair of HyperAdapts. She in fact wears them all day, every day. “I want to know every challenge our consumers are going to face. I just want to know everything in order to make it better.” There are no swooshes on her pair. That way, when she goes out in public, prying eyes will be less likely to discern that she’s wearing a pair of top-secret Nikes.

She sees me gazing mutely at the shoes as if awaiting instructions. “All you have to do is step into it,” Beers says. The second I do so, the shoe emits an electric whizzing noise, like that of a child’s toy. It’s the noise you might make if you were doing the robot. The sound is weirdly satisfying, possibly because it occurs as the shoe embraces my foot in a gentle kind of hug. Not long ago, I sprained my right ankle in an embarrassing encounter with a flight of stairs. As a result, my right foot remains swollen. After the whirring subsides, I stand up and look down. On my right shoe the laces are visibly looser, but the grip is no less secure.

nike_sidebar_hed.svg

1 10 In the basement of the Mia Hamm Building, there are a variety of labs that test new materials and designs. Behind these doors is the Ride Lab—the ride being Nike-speak for the sole of a shoe—where engineers test new iterations of Air soles and other cushioning technology.Art Streiber

2 10 Miniature ceramic replicas of Nike’s greatest hits line the wall outside Mark Parker’s office in the John McEnroe Building, across campus from Mia Hamm. The shoes on display range from high-performance soccer cleats to classic Dunks and running sneakers.Art Streiber

3 10 The Nike Sports Research Lab, split between the basement and first floor of Mia Hamm, is where researchers collect and analyze data related to performance. In this environmental testing chamber, researchers subject Nike clothing to extreme wind, heat, and humidity to gauge its durability.Art Streiber

4 10 Another area in the NSRL: the soccer testing room, where players can run and kick a ball while cameras and sensors measure how their prototype shoes perform. Nike does not make its R&D budget public, but everyone in the industry agrees that the company outspends its rivals by orders of magnitude.Art Streiber

5 10 Inside the Innovation Kitchen, on the first floor of Mia Hamm, an early-1970s Winnebago sits just outside the main conference room and is one of the designers’ preferred meeting spots. In Nike’s early days, Phil Knight drove a similar RV to high school and collegiate track meets all over Oregon, hustling shoes.Art Streiber

6 10 Behind Tinker Hatfield’s desk in the Innovation Kitchen, the limited-edition Nike Mags created for a charity auction in 2011 (and based on the original Back to the Future Part II model) are on display inside a transparent cube, as if in a museum exhibit.Art Streiber

7 10 Hatfield often creates special-edition sneakers exclusively for the athletes and student fans of his alma mater, the University of Oregon. Seen here on his desk: the Jordan Melo M10 “Oregon Ducks” PEs (player exclusive) and the Air Jordan Retro “Pit Crew.”Art Streiber

8 10 A corridor in Mia Hamm has a floor made from the material used in most modern running tracks. Last April, Nike announced plans to expand its campus by 3.2 million square feet, with the architecture taking “inspiration from human movement, speed, and the strength and energy of competition.” We can’t wait to visit.Art Streiber

9 10 The door to the rapid prototyping area in Nike’s lab. Our photographer was not “authorized personnel.”Art Streiber

10 10 A poster on a cubicle in Nike’s Innovation Kitchen.Art Streiber

1 10 In the basement of the Mia Hamm Building, there are a variety of labs that test new materials and designs. Behind these doors is the Ride Lab—the ride being Nike-speak for the sole of a shoe—where engineers test new iterations of Air soles and other cushioning technology.Art Streiber
2 10 Miniature ceramic replicas of Nike’s greatest hits line the wall outside Mark Parker’s office in the John McEnroe Building, across campus from Mia Hamm. The shoes on display range from high-performance soccer cleats to classic Dunks and running sneakers.Art Streiber
3 10 The Nike Sports Research Lab, split between the basement and first floor of Mia Hamm, is where researchers collect and analyze data related to performance. In this environmental testing chamber, researchers subject Nike clothing to extreme wind, heat, and humidity to gauge its durability.Art Streiber
4 10 Another area in the NSRL: the soccer testing room, where players can run and kick a ball while cameras and sensors measure how their prototype shoes perform. Nike does not make its R&D budget public, but everyone in the industry agrees that the company outspends its rivals by orders of magnitude.Art Streiber
5 10 Inside the Innovation Kitchen, on the first floor of Mia Hamm, an early-1970s Winnebago sits just outside the main conference room and is one of the designers’ preferred meeting spots. In Nike’s early days, Phil Knight drove a similar RV to high school and collegiate track meets all over Oregon, hustling shoes.Art Streiber
6 10 Behind Tinker Hatfield’s desk in the Innovation Kitchen, the limited-edition Nike Mags created for a charity auction in 2011 (and based on the original Back to the Future Part II model) are on display inside a transparent cube, as if in a museum exhibit.Art Streiber
7 10 Hatfield often creates special-edition sneakers exclusively for the athletes and student fans of his alma mater, the University of Oregon. Seen here on his desk: the Jordan Melo M10 “Oregon Ducks” PEs (player exclusive) and the Air Jordan Retro “Pit Crew.”Art Streiber
8 10 A corridor in Mia Hamm has a floor made from the material used in most modern running tracks. Last April, Nike announced plans to expand its campus by 3.2 million square feet, with the architecture taking “inspiration from human movement, speed, and the strength and energy of competition.” We can’t wait to visit.Art Streiber
9 10 The door to the rapid prototyping area in Nike’s lab. Our photographer was not “authorized personnel.”Art Streiber
10 10 A poster on a cubicle in Nike’s Innovation Kitchen.Art Streiber
Lead Image For Current Gallery
Second Image For Current Gallery Third Image For Current Gallery
10
Fourth Image For Current Gallery

The sneaker’s full name is the HyperAdapt 1.0, the numerals a nod to Silicon Valley’s always-be-iterating ethos, and it suggests that this shoe is just the start, one early product in a whole multiproduct, multiversion wave of Nike gear. The Kitchen is already working on future versions that will adjust to your foot automatically and in real time—as a runner’s feet swell, say, the shoes will correspondingly expand on their own, obviating the need for the buttons that allow current prototype users to adjust the fit manually. Nike is also working on making other parts of the shoe automatically adaptable—the breathability of the upper, for one, and the cushioning in the sole. When I ask how that would work, Hatfield clams up. “I’m not going to tell you more than that.” He says the whole idea is of a piece with emerging technologies like self-driving cars, like the Internet of Things.

In one of Beers’ final data-gathering tests, two teams convened in a Nike HQ fitness center to play a little basketball. Some of the athletes wore HyperAdapts, and Beers stood courtside like an anthropologist, observing closely. When the HyperAdapt-wearing players put on the shoes, they started to bend down to tie them and flinched as the shoes sucked up around their feet. Wow! Power laces! As the game got going, one player inbounded the ball, and before heading downcourt he pressed the buttons on his sneakers to tighten them. Another HyperAdapter was flying around, scoring from everywhere—slashing layups, pull-up jumpers, dunks off fast breaks. As the game wore on he grew more jubilant, and each time he made another basket he’d turn to Beers on the sidelines and yell, “It’s the shoes!” Beers, scribbling in her notepad, just kept listening.

Watch Tinker Hatfield Draw Our Cover

Scott Eden is the author of Touchdown Jesus: Faith and Fandom at Notre Dame.

This article appears in the October 2016 issue.

Styling by Tasha Green/Roster Reps; Grooming by Amy Gillespie/Roster Reps

Related Stories


glossier

The Beauty Upstart Glossier Talks—and Markets—Directly to You




Daimler’s Head of Design Wraps Drivers in Sensual Luxury




How Photographers Capture the Perfect Image—and Your Undivided Attention



The Art of Selling a Home That Does Not Exist



A Brief Oral History of Tinder’s Alluring Right Swipe



Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our user agreement (effective 3/21/12) and privacy policy (effective 3/21/12). Affiliate link policy. Your California privacy rights. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.