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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.”)
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.
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