Another epic offering from Spiritualized, “I’m Your Man” soars ever-so-gently, though is frequently disrupted by sonic deep dives and recoveries. Directed by Juliette Larthe, the accompanying video is more narrative short film than musical punctuation……
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The newest plane in the Emirates fleet—the Boeing 777-300ER—has plenty of impressive features, but perhaps the most surprising is its virtual windows for the first-class cabin. Instead of peering out of the plane, passengers will see real-time projections……
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The 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge in New York was designed to bring the surrounding park into the building, says architect Jonathan Marvel in this movie Dezeen filmed for the AHEAD hospitality awards.
Designed by Marvel Architects, the hotel stands alongside the Brooklyn Bridge Park, with views of the bridge and across the East River to Manhattan. The property has been nominated in seven categories at the AHEAD Americas awards, which will take place in Miami this week.
According to Marvel, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge was designed to seamlessly blend the experience of being in a hotel with that of the surrounding parkland.
“The hotel had to be designed in a way that allowed you to be part of the park, and everything in the hotel is themed around the park,” says Marvel in the movie, which Dezeen filmed at his New York office.
“There’s a plant in every room. There’s filtered water, there’s no bottled water, so we’re really operating in a sustainable way.”
The public areas on the ground floor of the hotel, which secured Marvel a nomination in the AHEAD Awards’ Lobby and Public Spaces category, have been designed to merge indoor and outdoor space.
“We created a big double height space around the perimeter of the building,” explains Marvel. “When you walk in through any of the doorways, you feel like you’re still outside because you’re in a space that’s thirty feet tall.”
The principle of bringing the park into the hotel was extended to the guestrooms. “When you go to the window you can slide open this amazing glass door and be in the park without actually having a terrace to walk out on,” he says.
The hotel was awarded a further nomination at the AHEAD Awards for an expansive suite, which comes complete a hammock. “The Riverhouse Suite is a very large area on one of the upper floors where you have this striking view of the city,” Marvel explains.
“There are no walls, and we’re really trying to bring the visitor into that harbour-front experience as much as possible.”
The materials that were used to construct the hotel reference Brooklyn’s history of waterfront industry.
“We wanted the building to feel like it was part of the industrial warehouse aesthetic of the working waterfront,”continues Marvel. “We wanted to bring that kind of ruggedness and no-nonsense to the aesthetics of the hotel.”
Hurricane Sandy, which struck New York in 2012, also had an impact on the design of the building.
“The levels of flooding in this area created an untenable and uninsurable situation the way we’d designed it, so we had to pick the whole building up five feet,” Marvel explains.
“In doing that, we really created an elevated plaza that didn’t exist in the previous design,” he continues.
“We created new ramps and stairs, and we had to pick up all of the boilers and create these bulkheads on the roof, because what normally would have been underground now had to be raised above ground.”
A notable element of the hotel’s design is a rooftop terrace with panoramic views of New York, which incorporates a bar and a swimming pool.
“We’ve created different pockets of areas around the roof itself,” says Marvel. “You have a very noisy side facing the Brooklyn Bridge, you have the dramatic side facing the New York City skyline, and then you have a quieter side where the pool is.”
The Hotel is attached to a neighbouring residential building called the Pierhouse, which Marvel Architects also designed as part of the same development. By mixing residential use and hospitality on the same site, Marvel hopes to foster interactions between locals and visitors.
“Hotels are not just a place for people to stay – they really act as the community’s living room,” states Marvel.
“People are welcome to visit the hotel, whether you’re a guest or you’re or not a guest. The interesting people who travel all over the world don’t just want to be with the other interesting people who travel all over the world, they want to be with the locals. And this is definitely a place where the locals want to hang out.”
1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge is the most-nominated hotel for the upcoming 2018 AHEAD Americas hospitality awards, which take place in Miami next week.
It is up for prizes in the Bar, Club or Lounge, Guestrooms, Landscaping and Outdoor Spaces, Lobby and Public Spaces, Spa and Wellness, Suite and Urban Hotel – New Build categories.
This movie was filmed at Marvel Architects’ office in New York for the AHEAD Awards. All photography is courtesy of 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge.
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Summer is a quiet season for architecture and design events, but there are still some important ones taking place. Highlights listed in our definitive guide include London Festival of Architecture, São Paulo Design Weekend and NeoCon, the commercial furniture fair in Chicago. More ›
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The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp hosts one of the world’s best prestigious fashion design courses. Here’s a look at all eight collections produced by this year’s masters graduates, featuring latex, animal prints and dazzle camouflage.
The Antwerp Fashion Department has produced many leading fashion designers, including Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten and Peter Pilotto.
This year the school showcased eight masters collections, produced by nine students, during a two-day event at Park Spoor Noord from 1 to 2 June 2018.
Highlights included a wardrobe for flamboyant criminals and a series of outfits that recall the shapes and colours of the Australian landscape.
“We will never cease to fight for our tailor-made, boundary-pushing and deep-digging fashion program – a curriculum that requires a one-on-one approach and that has brought forth some of the most reputable and paradigm-shifting designers out there!” said Walter Van Beirendonck, head of the Antwerp Fashion Department.
Here’s a look at all eight collections of 2018:
De Meersman is making a statement about corporate femininity with this latex-ridden outfit, inspired by the clothes her mother wore to work as a banker.
“I remember being in awe that, even within dressing formally, she always found a way of looking very feminine,” she said. “I’m working with a lot of latex, which obviously reads very sexy. But aside from that, I am adding a lot of tailored elements to my looks as a nod to corporate life.”
Kartchev’s collection mixes images from Bulgarian religious advertising, for everything from church services to fortune telling, with a range of other influences, including shop interiors, graphic design and sportswear.
“I’m using Bulgarian orthodox liturgical wear as an inspiration for the shapes and as a general influence, but I mixed it up with sportswear and a lot of other concepts I find aesthetically pleasing,” he said.
Di Leo’s designs are a response to the story of Rita Atria, a young Sicilian girl who killed herself to protect her testimony against the mafia. She made a series of paintings and transformed them into printed textiles.
“It’s my job to use all this heavy inspiration and turn it into something light and digestible” she explained.
Noa Kapchitz and Elijah Schali
These two looks combine traditional clothing from Ethiopian tribes – including a lot of leather skirts with metal rings – with 1920s couture.
“We appreciate the natural roughness of things,” said Schali. “We crafted many metal rings and added other handmade metal hardware, and mixed them with leather, juxtaposing the animalistic and almost brutal against the very sharp and clean.”
“The common factor of all of our inspirations is the timelessness they exude. Things that were revolutionary from the moment they were made and are still holding up a century later,” added Kapchitz.
For this look, Petrovic wanted to create “a wardrobe for the more flamboyant criminals of the 21st century”.
“When I’m designing, I’m not preoccupied with what people want to wear. I want to give them options, or a fantasy,” he said.
Harrison based her collection on the wilderness of Western Australia, where she grew up. It features fabrics shaped to look like plant life, animal prints and knitted flowers.
“For this collection I created a character that embodied my own love affair with nature: she is an Australian, white-trash goddess with a fetish for mother earth,” said Harrison.
Gruca’s collection combines soft shapes with bold prints, which he hopes are reminiscent of the dazzle camouflage used on battleships in the first and second world wars.
“I’m rather shy and quiet and in social situations and I want to disappear most of the time. Instead of looking at that as a negative, it became the initial inspiration for my Master’s collection,” he explained.
“I thought it would be nice to make my models disappear.”
Inspired by his mother, Genni Velotti has created a collection that explores traditional male and female dress, to question whether women can act like men.
“When you look at the overpowering narrative, especially in Italy, it says that women cannot act like men and that there is a big difference between the genders,” he said. “I began to think about the idea of a woman wearing men’s clothing.”
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For Princess Traveller Studio, Mango developed new travel products on a continuous basis. As with most designs by Studio Mango, we aim to solve problems small and large by adding valuable features and user experiences.
In this case a personal annoyance of a Studio Mango team member was presented as a concept sketch to the client. The annoyance being losing or not knowing where you have left your flight ticket and passport during the numerous of checks while traveling. This is a stressful situation for most people, even without having to keep track of your documents and valuables.
Joe Hebenstreit is at the forefront of an exciting new product that changes perceptions of augmented reality from an entertainment tool into a viable, highly useful product. As the CEO of Shaper Origin, “the world’s first handheld CNC machine” as they’ve dubbed it, he’s helping lead the example for how AR technology can drastically change people’s day to day lives. Recently we spoke with Hebenstreit, where the Core77 Design Awards Commercial Equipment Jury Captain shared more about his background in the field of engineering and AR as well as his thoughts on the innovations that will truly influence our future.
I started my career as a design engineer in the automotive industry and at some point in time I realized I had certain ambitions outside of just being strictly pigeon-holed within the automotive industry, and I inched to move more into product design to get a lot more general exposure. My time spent at frog design was really quite formative and provided a good opportunity for me to see a huge range of projects at different stages of development. It allowed me to move from just having exposure to the design and engineering side of products to also getting a lot better insight into the overall business impact to our clients. So, I think that was really a pretty formative step in my background and my career.
As an engineer and as a technologist, I developed a reputation at frog for being able to really help the designers pull off the stuff that they wanted to do. I was pulled into Amazon Lab 126, their hardware division, in the early days of Kindle development. Between my experience at Amazon and my experience at Google, I stayed in this area of being able to pull tricky technology out of a lab space and into more peripheralized settings, like actually applying to products.
The Shaper OriginBut, bringing it back to Shaper, I’m also a really hands-on builder, designer, maker and this has really been an interesting opportunity and very exciting to be able to pull together all of these previous experiences. For example, a lot of years of experience with user interactions and consumer electronics and bringing it into a product that really leverages quite complex technology that allows people to pull off things that would’ve otherwise been impossible to pull off.
I jumped into the process soon after I’d seen a much earlier version of a prototype, and that’s where I got involved in the conversation with Alec in particular and kind of developed a relationship where he’s picking my brain over steps to commercialization, since both of the founders came from more academic backgrounds and didn’t really have any experience. So that’s exactly where I got involved.
But the challenges of going from that to getting to a product that is now manufacturable and actually shipping to people today, it’s obviously a really huge jump. And I’m sure that the Core 77 audience is probably quite aware of all the challenges that exist of bringing any kind of complex, connected device to commercialization. But Origin was especially challenging—it’s effectively a handheld precision cutting robot that’s quite complex electromechanically, and also along the software side. This thing is entirely powered by computer vision, so a lot of stuff coming together.
But, one thing I’ll point out that’s pretty interesting, and I think especially relevant to things like new commercial equipment, where innovations are defining new product territories, is that there were a variety of hurdles including even understanding classifications for regulatory certifications. So, for example, is what we’re building a computer? Or is it a power tool? I mean, it’s actually both, but before this point, that kind of category or classification didn’t really exist, so we had to work really hard with regulatory agencies to figure out how to develop it, how to test it, how to make sure that it was safe for consumer applications, so… That’s a pretty big challenge to take on, but one worth doing.
Exactly. Yes.
Yeah. Thank you. That’s certainly something that we worked really hard at and it’s really important to us. And I think it just does come back to really thinking about where we want to be positioned as a company, but also really what kind of relationship we want to have with our user and how we want our user to be able to approach our tools. We wanted this to certainly be as or more capable than existing professional power tools, for example, but quite approachable and not intimidating and really, really speak to the idea of instead of somebody looking at our tools and thinking, “Wow, I need to go learn how to use this thing.” We really wanted people to just grab it and start using it and that’s how you do it.
Totally. Very off-putting and uninviting. So much our company and the people within it are mission focused, which has been very important. But I give a lot of credit to our designers who really challenged the status quo. I think the easy thing would be looking at a product in this industry and being like, “Okay, this is what tools are supposed to look like, so let’s rinse and repeat this.” But I give a lot of credit to our designers for not doing that. There’s a fine balance between completely alienating people who would use power tools.
I’ve always been, I mentioned, very hands-on and kind of a maker, builder, house remodeler, whatever. Tinkerer, machinist, welder, all that stuff. And I think, no doubt, my various experiences of my past converged [with Shaper]. I think especially my experiences with working on [Google] Glass forced me to spend a lot of the time thinking about augmentation and what that really means for human performance. So, I would maybe consider it a zeitgeist of where my mind was at when I met Alec and Ilan, who are the founders of Shaper.
For me personally, I’ve never been all that excited about the prospect of, for example, a Starbucks ad being served up into my eyeball at the just the right time when I’m walking down the street. That’s not necessarily my ideal state of human augmentation, but when I ran into these guys at a tech conference, I was immediately floored by the concept quite honestly. Not necessarily floored by the fact that it is a woodworking router, but I could very, very clearly see that this is the beginning of something that is inevitable. This intersection between humans and machines; there really isn’t a solid line anymore. It’s not like the robot sitting over in the corner and it’s over there doing his or her thing. It’s really this symbiotic relationship between humans and machines. I got really excited about that and it’s really what’s driven the vision of where we’re going.
Right. The industry, in general, is still at this preliminary stage where people are trying to figure out, almost painfully, how do we apply AR to whatever we’re doing and what does it mean? But for us, it’s very clear.
The most useful [augmented reality] applications will be those where the user can actually impact their physical reality with digital information that’s presented or applied at the exact right time and at the exact right place or space.
It’s interesting because we see a lot of noise and hype around AR or mixed reality, but this is exactly what we’re doing with this product and I think that this is the area where it’s best utilized. The most useful applications will be those where the user can actually impact their physical reality with digital information that’s presented or applied at the exact right time and at the exact right place or space.
I think that’s the really exciting thing and, of course, there is a huge range of opportunities. Entertainment is one that we see…This is definitely what’s powering our machine and kind of where we’re redefining the intuition-based user interface between what would have normally been a very complex precision cutting operation and making that quite simple for anybody to use within minutes of approaching the tool.
This is always a huge, huge challenge. When cool, new technology arrives, and you have a team of engineers who are excited about bringing a cool technology to market, I think what’s get lost a lot of times is actually the user. So the one overarching principle I like to apply is to always place the user first. And I think it is cliché by now, particularly with Core77 audience in general, but really any time you’re working on new stuff the goal should be for the radical new technology to basically just disappear, to be invisible to the user.
If we’re doing our jobs right, nobody should really care, for example, that Shaper Origin is powered by computer vision, augmented reality and all of those words. Really what people should care about is that “Wow, I just approached this thing. It was very intuitive, natural. I picked it up. I presented it this view of my workspace and I’m just going to start cutting and I kind of know what to do next because it’s obvious what to do next.” So, for us, Shaper’s core mission is to make precision cutting easy and accessible, so we just keep looking for areas of user friction and existing processes and then we aim to reduce that friction.
The formula that we apply is when something is easy, it is used more frequently. It becomes the go-to solution if users are inclined to do it. Is it easy? Great, they’re gonna use it. And so, if we are solving real problems for real users, then commercial success will follow.
Pretty heavy question! There have been so many things obviously. I think we’re obviously in a special time where things are quickly converging and moving rapidly. The really obvious standout ones are things like autonomous vehicles, how that will reshape the landscape of what our road looks like.
Personally, what I’m most looking forward to, especially in industrial scale and applications, is really the convergence of digital design information and the physical world. I really get excited about this concept of bits to atoms and atoms to bits, and having this very fluid loop between those worlds. So I’m very excited about innovations and things like reality capture and innovations, and being able to manipulate physical matter and to be able to, like I mentioned, very quickly move back and forth between these worlds so that it’s much more seamless than it has been in the past. I think that’s gonna be really important to a lot of industrial applications, whether it’s very large-scale, architectural-scale buildings or personal fabrication project.
Yeah, it will be especially important for designers to just remain focused on end user. I keep coming back to that because I just think it’s so important.
Again, this comes back to the user side. The most important aspects to keep in mind are actually designing for the user in these cases instead of designing machines and then asking users to conform to them. Using Shaper as an example, we are really rethinking concepts around precision cutting. Very frequently when people within the industry think of precision cutting, I think people naturally think of CNC, and CNC is a very powerful concept. Computer control is a very powerful concept applied to a lot of commercial, industrial applications. I would consider it the invisible key-enabling technology behind that drives just about everything that’s manufactured.
So, CNC is such a hugely powerful concept, but it’s this behind the scenes thing that few people outside a very specific industry know about, or necessarily even need to care to know about it. But the basics of how it operates really hasn’t changed since it was developed in the early ’50s to manufacture airplane components in very repeated, in large quantities. So I think that’s a really good example of something where equipment is very complex and processes are complex. For somebody to be very proficient in CNC it usually takes a lot of years of experience, a lot of knowledge, a lot of trial and error, a lot of just training, right?
And that’s a really good example of the way things were done originally, where the user was forced to mold themselves to that environment, so learn the equipment. Learn the complicated interface. Learn the complicated workflow. This was how it had to be. I think that what we’re doing at Shaper is turning that around and saying user first and how can we bring the tools and the interfaces to the user to something that would be more natural and intuitive, and kind of change the thought process behind how this is done. That’s a driving force.
I think that that is one of the most important elements to keep in mind when designing for users in this space, especially in a commercial environment where, as you indicated, so many things are really on the line. This is certainly, potentially much more high-stakes impact, whether it’s a medical device or a big piece of commercial equipment in a steel plant or something like this, where workplace safety would be important.
The winners of the 2018 Core77 Design Awards will be announced this Thursday, June 14th at Core77.com. To check out all of the winners from the 2017 awards, click here.
Explore this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a secluded courtyard designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, in this exclusive 360-degree video filmed by Dezeen.
The Serpentine Pavilion 2018 features latticed walls made from wavy concrete roof tiles, a curving mirrored ceiling and a triangular pool of water.
As the youngest architect to take on the prestigious commission, Escobedo designed the building to reference the courtyard homes that are typical in Mexico, as well as the perforated “celosia” walls that allow light and breeze to pass through.
The pavilion is open to the public from 15 June to 7 October 2018, in London’s Kensington Gardens.
Find out more about the Serpentine Pavilion 2018 ›
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American firm Kieran Timberlake has used prefabricated components to create a mountaintop retreat, composed of a main dwelling wrapped in weathering steel and glass, and two micro cabins for guests.
The project, called High Horse Ranch, is located just outside the town of Willits, about three hours north of San Francisco. Situated on 64 wooded acres (26 hectares), the holiday retreat consists of a main house and a pair of small cabins for overnight visitors. It offers a completely different living experience for the owners, whose primary home is a renovated industrial space in San Francisco’s Mission District.
“In contrast to their introverted loft, High Horse Ranch was designed to be outwardly focused and defined by the site, its views, and the natural landscape,” said Kieran Timberlake, an architecture studio based in Philadelphia.
The scenic terrain features open meadows, evergreen shrubs and groves of oak, Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees. To access the home, visitors must travel on a gravel road that winds up through the hills.
“The owners were struck by the dramatic experience of approach and arrival, where the edge of a cliff falls away and reveals a panoramic view of the forested valley below,” the architects said.
“Accordingly, the design was driven by their early vision of the guest experience: a long, climbing drive; a short, shaded walk to a sheltered welcoming area; and then, upon entering the house and rounding a corner, taking in the view.”
Early in the project, the placement of each building was carefully considered and adjusted several times in order to maximise views and reduce tree clearings. Oriented southwest to northeast, the main home sits between the two cabins. Each of the smaller buildings is about 150 feet (46 metres) away from the central dwelling.
Encompassing 2,580 square feet (240 square metres), the main home consists of two offset bars – one for public functions, the other for private rooms. The exterior is clad in perforated Corten screens and features a built-in nook for storing firewood. The building is sheltered by an overhanging roof, with soffits sheathed in wood.
Serving as the “social centre of the house”, the public zone contains an open-plan kitchen, dining area and living room. Large, glazed pivoting doors offer sweeping views of a verdant valley and enable the space to be fully open to the outdoors. The private pavilion contains a bedroom and a study, designed as a “refuge for reading and concentration”.
The cabins – each 290 square feet (27 square metres) – sit atop concrete piers and utilise the same material palette as the main home. Each casita offers a different perspective, as one is oriented to the valley and the other looks toward a canyon. Both provide guests a high level of privacy and comfort.
“While they are dependent on the main house for meals and community, each cabin offers guests privacy and solitude with a bathroom, study desk, covered porch and fire pit,” the studio said.
All three buildings were constructed using modular parts that were prefabricated offsite. The owners, who wanted to minimise the project’s environmental impact, drew inspiration from one of Kieran Timberlake’s earlier projects – the Loblolly House, a prefabricated home in Maryland that was completed in 2006.
“The owners favoured building techniques that would touch the site lightly and reduce construction waste,” said the studio. “As a result, the design uses off-site modular construction throughout with varying degrees of fit-out.”
The main house comprises two primary modules and 11 secondary modules, while each guest cabin is composed of a single module. Built in a factory, the modules were “carefully transported up winding roads and set in place without harming a single tree”.
Kieran Timberlake was founded by architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in 1984. Other projects by the firm include the Pound Ridge House in New York, which has a mirrored facade, and the US Embassy in London, which consists of a glass cube partially wrapped in ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE).
Photography is by Tim Griffith.
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Nike is putting new focus into sustainability, says chief operating officer Eric Sprunk, and has just created a new super material from recyclable natural leather fibre.
Speaking to Dezeen at the recent Copenhagen Fashion Summit, Sprunk revealed details about Flyleather, which he described as a “huge breakthrough”.
The product, which has taken Nike‘s scientists and engineers years to develop, is claimed to be the lowest carbon-footprint leather material ever made.
Flyleather will be used in Air Jordan and Air Max
Sprunk said it will be used in the manufacture of bestselling trainers such as Air Jordan and Air Max, ensuring they retain their style and comfort, but also contribute to the global effort to conserve resources and preserve the environment.
“Leather is a very high footprint material in our industry,” said Spunk. “I think athletic footwear is one of the top leather industries, behind automobiles, and it has a significant carbon footprint all the way from cows feeding in the fields to dyeing in the hides.
Sustainable design doesn’t have to be ugly
“We finally feel we have a breakthrough,” Spunk continued. [But] I’m not going to ask customers to accept sustainability because it’s sustainable. We’re asking them to have a lighter feeling, more sustainable leather on the shoes that they love – and they’re not even going to know it!
“They’re going to say, ‘This is better’. That’s a great win. An ugly shoe designed for sustainability: that’s no victory.”
During a typical leather manufacturing process, some 30 per cent of the cow’s hide is discarded and often ends in landfill, according to Nike. To reduce this waste, Nike gathers the discarded leather from the tannery floor and turns it into fibres.
These are combined with synthetic fibres and a fabric infrastructure via a hydro process of such force that it fuses everything into one material. This then goes through a finishing process, before being put on a roll to be cut to fit the shoes.
Many Nike products contain recyclable materials
According to Spunk, 75 per cent of Nike products already contain some recyclable materials.
For example, a dye-colouring process for the soles of Air trainers allows for 99 per cent of recoverable dye water to be recycled; and all the shoe’s post-2008 sole innovations are composed of at least 50 per cent recyclable waste. The new VaporMax sole, which contains more than 75 per cent recyclable material, has allowed Nike to remove the need for a layer of foam.
“Our rule is: there is no innovation without sustainability,” said Sprunk.
Sustainability was the main focus of the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, which saw forward-thinking fashionistas meet to discuss the future of their industry from the perspective of social and environmental awareness.
Other brands represented at the two-day conference, which is now in its sixth year, were Stella McCartney, H&M and Burberry.
However, it was a mark of the event’s growing importance, and of Nike’s commitment to its sustainability drive, that Spunk, who usually maintains a low profile, made an appearance.
The full interview can be read here:
Lucy Jones: You mentioned in your speech that you haven’t always been so concerned about sustainability. What changed your mind?
Eric Sprunk: We hired William McDonough, to redesign our European headquarters.
I worked with Bill, and he’s very in tune with making sure the buildings don’t interrupt nature. The HQ is now 25 years old. There’s grass on the roof. The rain is collected to flush the toilets. That was my first learning.
We spent a lot of time together and still do. Out of that I got conviction that, though it may not make the most business sense right now, [thinking about sustainability] is the right thing to do and I think it would be a good innovation challenge for our creative teams.
So we gave them a challenge.
Once I had some conviction of the fact that once you use sustainability as a catalyst for innovation to get you to solutions you would have never gotten to if you weren’t thinking about it from a sustainability perspective. That’s pretty powerful.
It’s easy at Nike to wrap the designers and creatives and innovators around something that will be a catalyst for even better solutions than, “hey it’s the right thing to do”. It may or may not be compelling to certain individuals.
Lucy Jones: When briefing designers, are you asking them to make your products more sustainably, or are you asking them to create something solely with sustainability in mind?
Eric Sprunk: We go both ways. It is always good to be pressing what’s possible purely from a sustainability perspective. We learn things on that journey.
But, we make hundreds of millions of shoes, and hundreds of millions of garments. Our rule is: there is no innovation without sustainability. You cannot go backwards. The next version of this cannot go backwards. It may not leap forwards, but it cannot go backwards.
Sustainability is just a part of what we do
The creative element of the company, and the innovators look on that as a catalyst. It’s a new way of thinking, its a new lens that creates solutions that you would have if you just said: “Hey make it lighter’, make it less expensive, make it prettier, make it a different colour, oh and by the way, you can’t make it with these restrictive substances, it can’t have a bigger carbon footprint, you have to used more recycled material, you can’t have a much waste”.
A good design creative exercise needs some constriction to force and guide it. Sustainability is just a part of what we do, it has been for 10 years.
Lucy Jones: A large company like Nike has money to invest in responsible innovation. How do smaller companies start their journey to a circular economic future?
Eric Sprunk: It’s a difficult decision for all size companies.
Nike Air is arguably the most well known cushioning platform we have – it’s been around forever. To get at this new method of making, we had to stop all the other innovation of Nike Air. Really unpopular. It took several years. So while we were trying to solve for this fluorinated gas issue, we stopped trying to make it more flexible, more lighter, make it thinner, all the stuff you would normally do in a research and development.
We didn’t have enough money so we had to make a decision: this is important enough for us to take all of the money we dedicate to research and development on Nike Air and put it against driving a [responsible] solution. That took a little bit of convincing.
It wasn’t that we had resources to spend more. We made a decision to spend just on this.
Lucy Jones: Do you think it’s important for a big company like Nike to lead this change?
Eric Sprunk: I think there are higher expectations on us because of our size and our scale. Great, I accept that.
The thing that’s going to make the difference between today and three years, is transparency and collaboration. Right now, take the smallest company and us at the other end, we’re all going at it with our own agenda.
We share a little bit. We’re doing transparency but there is zero collaboration on issues like this.
I think people look at Nike and think they’re never going to collaborate and we’re super competitive.
Lucy Jones: There’s been problems at Nike recently with internal collaboration. How do you plan on convincing external partners that you’d like to be more collaborative?
Eric Sprunk: I think everyone in our industry would love us to be more collaborative. So in these precompetitive spaces we’ve made a commitment. We’re not going to solve these problems on our own.
Lucy Jones: What do you think you Nike will take on board from smaller companies they partner with?
Eric Sprunk: Innovative ideas. This event is the perfect example, everyone here is talking about “pineapple leather”, which cracks me up! But there are literally hundreds of ideas. The really difficult thing is to take it to scale but I guarantee, Nike don’t have anybody working on pineapple leather! So, inspiration, innovation, creativity, material development.
We need companies like Nike with the scale and the breadth to take some of these ideas and scale them
Lucy Jones: What ideas can we expect to see coming up from Nike in terms of innovation?
Eric Sprunk: We have tons more. Flyleather is the latest. The more exciting thing about it is, I think we can scale it. I don’t criticise the prototype or the small batches but a thousand small batches of a hundred is not going to win the day here. We need companies like Nike with the scale and the breadth to take some of these ideas and scale them, like Flynet, and by having Nike Air be more sustainable.
Leather is a very high footprint material in our industry. I think athletic footwear is one of the top leather industries behind automobiles, and it has a significant carbon footprint all the way from cows feeding in the fields to dying the hides.
It’s a huge breakthrough. We’ve been working on it for years. We finally feel like we have a breakthrough that we think we can scale and we’re not going to say “hey this is the Flyleather shoe made for sustainability”. It’s going to go on the Air Jordan. It’s going to go on the Air Max. That’s also really, really important.
I’m not asking consumers to accept sustainability because its sustainable, we’re asking them to have a lighter feeling, more sustainable leather on the shoes that they love – and they’re not even going to know it!
They’re going to say this is better. That’s a great win. An ugly shoe designed for sustainability – there’s no victory.
Lucy Jones: How much are you learning from your consumers?
Eric Sprunk: We listen to the voice of the consumer and learn something every day. Not all consumers from one region of the world has the same lense on sustainability. It’s probably more a nuance but there’s a nuance the consumer expects from a brand like us in this space so we listen to them all.
That’s what drives us. And if you’re an innovator or creator and you’re in our company, your consumer comes first. That’s where it starts.
Lucy Jones: Are you concerned about what your competitors are doing in this area?
Eric Sprunk: I’m not worried about it. A competitive work space is a better. We are always better when we’ve got a good feel for a competitive market place.
Lucy Jones: Do you believe some of the collaboration you’ve talked about for the future will need to take place with your rivals?
Eric Sprunk: For sure. Precompetitive things. Not on the design of our product. I started a forum with all of our competitive brands. I’ve spent lots of time on the phone with brands.
We have got to be more collaborative in these areas. The health and wellbeing in the factory. I don’t need to compete with you on having the best audit. I don’t need to compete with you on who made the life of the worker better, all of us need to be doing that.
All of us should be working towards renewable energy.
Lucy Jones: What are you closing thoughts on the matter of social responsibility in the fashion industry?
Eric Sprunk: We’ve got to stop figuring out where we’re going to make [a product] and we have to start to figuring out how we’re going to make it.
We’re trying to transform the entire manufacturing supply chain for our product, and in doing so, reimagine where we make it.
All of us should be working towards renewable energy.
The job is to transform manufacturing, not just be more sustainable. You cannot transform manufacturing without sustainability. You have to believe that, I think, to drive the innovation that is necessary.
We know at Nike it makes our product better. We’ve lived it. We live it every day and our consumers tell us.
If you don’t believe it’s making your product better and more consistent, more wearable, you’re never going to do it.
We crossed that bridge 10 years ago. Which is why we can stand up and say we are farther ahead than a lot of other companies. You’ve got to make a commitment and a belief.
A worker who feels empowered is healthy is at work on time and is more productive feels safer, attrition is lower. Training is less. That is important for the health and wellbeing of the worker – it also makes for better shoes and better apparel. And if you don’t believe that you’re in it for the wrong reason.
I hope people say, Nike’s not doing this because they believe they’re doing the right thing, Nike are doing this because they believe it’s more innovative and makes the product better, AND good for the planet, and good for the worker.
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