Who: Steve McDonald
What: Nike Innovation Kitchen Pantry
Why: To serve innovation outside-the-box approaches to shoe design thought Nike

You don’t become the No. 1 athletic shoe brand in the world without being an innovator. Taking fresh approaches to design challenges is the primary goal of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen group, a team within Nike that “serves innovation” to all of the shoemaker’s product teams, whose directives often focus on fine-tuning or developing shoes specifically to contribute to an athlete’s performance in his or her chosen sport.

 

The Kobe Bryant Hyperdunk was a top seller in late 2008.

Within the Innovation Kitchen, Tinker Hatfield—the architect-cum-shoe designer who designed most of the acclaimed Air Jordan basketball shoes, as well as the first pair of Nike Air cross-trainers—heads up a group within the Innovation Kitchen known as “The Pantry,” for which freelance designer Steve McDonald works full-time, usually from his home office near Park City, Utah. He also works every other week or so at Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon, headquarters, and makes regular trips to Asia to meet with people at the factories that make Nike shoes and apparel he designs.

The Pantry’s directive “is basically to break the mold and completely look at things in new ways,” says McDonald, “like new ways of making shoes, completely new technologies. Basically the general way shoes have been made hasn’t changed in 25 to 40 years. We’re trying to break that mold.” That includes streamlining the process from both a man-hour and environmental-toll perspective, McDonald says. “Very few people understand that as many as 200 people actually hold and do something to a shoe before you get it. We don’t think that’s necessary.”

The ACG Free Deschutz sandal is an update to McDonald’s original Air Deschutz from the early ’90s that started the boom in performance sport sandals.

”Designers in the Pantry—who all use some type of Mac-based setup and avail themselves of the usual cadre of Adobe design apps, including Photoshop and Illustrator—often get the chance to work directly with the high-profile athletes whose names will appear on certain shoes and athletic gear.

McDonald says Kobe Bryant was fairly hands-on in the development process for the Kobe Zoom III, for example, a basketball shoe with a unique take on the Air concept. “When we did the Zoom III, Kobe was very into black mamba snakes,” McDonald says. “The design was modeled around how the mamba skin expands and contracts, allowing free and precise movement.

“There’s a way of making a textile where you have fabric on the top surface, a 5-millimeter gap, another piece of textile, and they weave them together, so the fabric looks like a little truss,” McDonald says. “What we did was laminate this plastic to both sides of the textile and fill it with air. Normally if you fill a balloon with air, it always wants to become a sphere. If you want it flat, then you have to have some way of making that work. So basically we created this fabric that turns into a truss, and it keeps it from expanding into a sphere, so you can have a 5- to 6-millimeter airbag that’s very thin but still very cushiony.”

McDonald designed the Kobe Zoom III’s unique mesh-patterned exterior on his Mac, in Illustrator CS3. Then, his design was brought to life with rapid prototyping. “We used a process where polyurethane is injected in a grid pattern onto the surface of a textile,” McDonald says.

The Zoom Kobe III, Black Mamba edition was inspired by Kobe Bryant’s interest in black mamba snakes. Click to enbiggen image

McDonald’s Mac setup is centered around a Mac Pro, and he takes a MacBook Pro with him on the road.

Hatfield, the Pantry’s leader, does a lot of his design work the old-fashioned way: pencil to paper—and by working closely with the athletes and other stakeholders on a given product. As for the Pantry itself, the recently remodeled area that the onsite team works from—full of Macs and widescreen Apple Cinema Displays—is sure to turn any creative pro envy green.

One of McDonald’s pet causes in the Pantry is trying to lessen the environmental impact of every pair of shoes he designs. “Say a shoe is made from 50 different materials. If I can reduce that to one or two, then all the transportation involved with each of those materials [is reduced]; so I made the entire process more efficient, and overall it’s just a better process.”

The Nike Dunk Jamaica was produced as a Considered shoe, so it had a smaller carbon footprint.

This goal aligns nicely with shoes that McDonald and other Pantry designers have produced as part of Nike’s Considered program, which doesn’t even technically bring shoes to market. Instead, McDonald says, “they measure everything, approve every bit of material that we use, make sure we’re being as clean as possible.” There’s  a whole list of environmentally preferred materials, for example, that the Considered team developed and approved. “They constantly measure everything, so we can limit the waste we’re creating.”

Having worked for Frog Design back in the day on the first Mac keyboard, McDonald is a veteran industrial designer, but he keeps his ear to the sidewalk as much as possible. “I look around at different technologies,” he says, “what kids are doing, even outside of footwear—cultural, events, and trends—and try to make sure Nike’s always in tune with where things are headed.