nike籃球鞋設計 / 卓思陽

球鞋設計 / NIKE basketball shoes
Example: Zoom kobe V, AIR JORDAN 2011

Basketball Game has changed tremendously for last five years, it has been from individual player positions to hyper players, and to now, players can transcend to any position.

A pair of basketball shoes is like a part of your feet, you cut, you jump,  you change directions, you drive through, all kinds of things, and your shoes is whom you can trust.

Nike does a totally great job on basketball shoes developing.
From Research and Development, Inspiration and Design, to Commercial and Style.



Research and Development

Nike created a facility to do all the research and testing called the NSRL (Nike Research Sports Lab). The NSRL is led by an ex NASA astronaut advisor, Mario Lafortune. In 1996 Mario gathered the best sports researchers in the business and established his Nike Lab. This lab is special because it is not run by your typical lab coat scientists. These scientists are ex-athletes who have expereinced the ups and downs of athletic competition.

These scientists study every aspect of the athlete. Including biomechanics, physiology and sensory/perception.

“To do all this, the scientists have an incredible array of measurement and analysis tools. Their data collection includes virtually every variety of muscle sensor, pressure platform, breath analyzer, foot scanner and thermal imaging device that has ever fluttered into the sci-fi imaginings of the most psychotic geek researcher. Two of the most striking are the high-speed video cameras that capture soccer kick data at 1,000 frames per second and the scanner that produces in just seconds a perfect 3D digital image of your foot, even if you’re a size 22, as was one recent visitor.”

The Nike Sports Research Lab identifies the needs of athletes by breaking down their specific motions. The team of 25 staff researchers employs scientific techniques to educate our athletes and improve Nike product—ranging from foot morphology to high-speed video.

In basketball shoes there is a number tools they can use,they can use high speed video, that allows to film a very high rated speed and see things you can’t see with the naked eyes, we can look at things like: how much compression of a midsole occurs, or how much sheer is happening on the upper of the shoe or in the midsole, or how much is the shoe torching if it’s not built ultimately, we can look at things like cushioning characteristics, it tells us the three dimensional forces that the ground puts in the foot, and ultimately through the shoes, we can use plan of pressures, or even extra pressure measurements to look at how the is reacting to the different cushioning elements, are they too hard? Too soft? Are they properly located in position? Doing all the research and testings.


below is a video about the techniques that Nike Sports Research Lab had developed.
(IE is recommended )








Inspiration and Design

Nike has invited many basketball stars to join the design team and they even design shoes for the legendary stars like Michael Jordan, Lebron James and Kobe Bryant. Also, these athletes know what they really need while they are battling on the court, and how to perform wonderfully through the games.

They not only solve the problems of the old basketball shoes, but they also emphasize the expression through customization. The three areas that Nikes have really focused on to bring the stories, and the inspiration on the shoes, is between materials graphics and colors. By using the techs like Nike air max cushion, Fly wire or cooperate with NSRL, they design different kinds of shoes for different kind of players.

Michael Jordan / Nike

Lebron James / Nike

Kobe Bryant / Nike

  

Commercial and Style

“Every great brand has a powerful story to tell. By creating these stories and sharing them, brands can build a powerful, emotional connection to their audiences. Stories are compelling because that’s how our lives unfold. Stories provide context to what happens in our lives. You have a story to accompany anything that happens in your life. When brands tell stories, it makes them feel more real, more alive, more honest…more like us.

Stories influence brands the same way stories influence our lives. Grandma tells us a story and it becomes a part of who we are. It explains something about us. Stories are something we share as families, and as employees. Our stories make us unique, and help us imagine the traits that set us apart — and likely way above all the rest.

They tell stories not only by commercial ads or websites, but also through many ways. For example, nike cooperate with Apple ipod, establishing a different style with others. Another example, working with movie directors: Robert Rodriguez, directed a small movie showing the concept according to the new released zoom kobe VI.

Stories of strength, of obstacles overcome, of passion, and belief, mistakes made and hard work that paid off (maybe even when no one else believed it would), that’s something to build a family or a brand around.” said Chuck Eichten, Design Director of Nike DNA.





Below are two examples for the design process of nike basketball shoes, nike zoom kobe V with videos, and air jordan2011 with articles and videos.



1.NIKE ZOOM KOBE V














2. NIKE AIR JORDAN 2011
The Jordan 2011 is part of a long line of evolution in basketball shoe design. Its lighter, it fits better its formfitting to the foot eternally and it has a beautiful show on the outside. Its still very protective, and allows people to cut right and left at very high speed. We very early unestablished that we wanted to develop a more modular kind of basketball shoe, that actually allow the users to actually change the midsole themselves. The AJ 2011 allows you to take the entire midsole out, and put another midsole in, and going from a very protection cushion ride to a very responsive ride.

For the quick player, we offer zoom cushioning with a much firmer platform. For the explosive vertical player, we are offering air cushioning with cushion lung.

Usually shoes are built specific to an athlete’s needs or a specific segment. Sometimes we design a shoe for a quick guy, sometimes for an explosive guy, and sometimes it’s for someone who uses his jumping ability to his advantage. Different players like different platforms. So the quick, fast players, point guards who are cutting a lot, they might want something firmer. Someone on the perimeter, who uses a lot of side-to-side cutting, he’s going to want a lot of medial and lateral movement. He’s going to want something a bit firmer and with more responsive cushioning underfoot. The bigger guys under the basket might want something softer with more cushioning. We want to be able to provide him with some solid cushioning so that he stays protected, jumping up and down under the basket all the time.


Here is an interview with the co-designer of air Jordan 2011

This has been tried before, with limited success, by different brands. How does modularity fit into the Jordan line?

We have foams and 3-D modeling capabilities to really get after it, and allow us to take modularity to the next level. Our process now, and our digital molding technologies, are enablers for us to finally do this. This is the first product where you can take the entire midsole out and switch it up, essentially giving you a completely new shoe.

How do you go about creating a shoe from the ground up?
When we started the project, the shoes came back extremely wide, and extremely heavy, and during the early prototyping, Jordan Brand would have had a hard time calling this a performance product. Sure the shoes were modular, but they weren’t anything that you could call a performance shoe. But that was the challenge: we tried to take two ends of the spectrum and slam them together, trying to come up with a better solution than anyone had before us.

The original prototypes were huge and looked like a panel on the foot. It took iteration after iteration to get them to really turn into shoes and to get it to form to the foot without changing the fit properties. We needed the shoe to still fit like a regular Jordan shoe, but we needed to allow users to be able to take the midsole out. On a regular shoe, you’d take the upper, slide it over the midsole, and secure it. But here there is a lot more engineering and surfacing going on.

Like what?
We needed to make sure the midsole fit tight in the shoe—you can’t have pieces sliding around in there, so the measurements have to be very exact, a very tight press fit. In the first three or four iterations, we couldn’t get to a stable product because the parts aren’t glued together—they’re loose. So the challenge was to get the parts to fit tightly and to provide stability when they’re not attached to each other.


So if we’re looking at the shoe now, you must have figured it out.
Haha. Yeah. After a bunch of rounds we got it there. To figure that out took a lot of testing and brainstorming. To the consumer it’s intuitive, like, “Oh great, I can switch this out and go play basketball.” But it took a lot to get us there. A lot of people had very high doubts that this was possible, but we just kept pushing on and making new versions of it.


This shoe is modular, but it’s also a high-performing basketball shoe, so key athletes take to the product. The challenges from a technical perspective were to get the product as strong and as sleek as we could while allowing us to keep this idea of modularity alive. The shoes are a reductive exercise: we want to give the maximum protection and comfort while keeping the shoe light and strong. The leather is extremely thin, and has a high-tech backing material.


You worked in the Innovation Kitchen and have designed shoes for Nike Basketball. How do the two link up? Does technology transfer over?
I was working in the innovation group at Nike before coming on at Jordan, so there were a lot of things I learned there that obviously come over into a shoe like this. We definitely want to leverage what we learn throughout the company, it would be silly not to. The panels in the back are actually no-sew panels, they’re not fuse panels like on the Hyperfuse. It’s a different process.



Design features

MIDSOLE TEXTURE

In order to prevent any type of squeaking from two very smooth surfaces rubbing up against each other, the texture provides tiny air pockets that help create a friction to prevent squeaking. You see the same pattern on the outsole, but that is more of an aesthetic feature.

SHOE HEIGHT/CUFF

With any kind of motion in the foot, you don’t want to prevent the ankle from lining up with the knee and the heel the way the body is trying to move. If you overbuild a shoe in these areas, it becomes very easy to put unnecessary pressures on the ankle and potentially induce injury. You want the ankle to be able to naturally align with the knee and the heel so you need to have a certain amount of give in the ankle of the sneaker to allow for that. You want a straight line-hip, knee, ankle, heel—in order to cut down on injury. We actually allow the collar to collapse a little bit, so if you wiggle your ankle around in there you can actually bend that collar over. You’re still going to get lockdown, but it will get out of your way to keep you safe.

LACING SYSTEM

This was one part that was critical in making the shoes modular. The laces are gillied down below the midsole so the user can actually lace really really tight, and get lockdown around the midsole that’s in there. The laces run all the way down to the strobel underneath the midsole, so when you pull on the gilles you have direct hold all the way underfoot. That is critical in order to have stability in a product that has a midsole that is not attached. It’s basically pressed in there, so the laces help make it all fit.

OUTSOLE TREAD PATTERN

With the outsole tread, Jordan has always done graphic iterations. I tried to take something that was iconically Jordan, the elephant print, and engineer it to a point where it speaks to the motion of the foot. The elephant print in the tread swirls in the forefoot right under the pivot point. This technique also creates a denser pattern around the high-wear zone. With that swirl you get more rubber in the highest wear spots, so you’re going to get a longer life in that high-wear zone, same as with a herringbone pattern. The traction properties are the same as any standard herringbone, but it's just engineered in a new way. The sole also has key flex grooves for medial and lateral cutting, and a heel crash for forward propulsion. The Nike Sports research lab really helped with this, for figuring out the optimal placements for these grooves.

SIDE PANEL

MJ and Tinker talked about a warrior-type mentality, sort of getting ready for battle, the idea that lacing up your shoes is the last thing before you go out to battle. We tried to get to this more organic sort of warrior-theme pattern, and to get the graphic element we looked at warrior paintings and body paint. If you look at the way the pattern changes from the back to the front of the foot as you flex your foot you can see that as you flex your foot the linear pattern lines up with the crease grooves and basically allows the leather to wrinkle right in the spot where we embossed. It’s a premeditated embossing pattern that allows the leather to flex so that the shoe wears well.

TOEBOX

I think when you look down on the shoe, what we tried to do was to make something sleek while still keeping the modularity story alive. It’s a delicate proportion balance to make a shoe that looks sleek but not gimmicky. A shorter vamp helps in the overall design. It comes down to proportion. It’s tighter in the forefoot, and in the final design we felt it was best looking with one large leather panel in the toebox.

VENTILLATION

The perforation on these shoes goes all the way through the leather. A lot of companies claim that they have a ventilated product, but usually they have to reinforce the lining package on the inside so you’re not getting complete ventilation. What we tried to do was we used a very high-grade re-enforcer on the leather, and because it’s such a high grade we can fully push through it and get the support that we still need. The mesh panel allows air to travel all the way though. You can literally put your hand on the inside of the shoe and blow through those holes and feel it. We wanted it to be very breathable, per the athlete requests.

INSPIRATION STORY

MJ was 100% on board with modularity. He thought it was a strong concept and knew it was a risk going after the idea for the icon shoe for the year. He talked a lot about the fact that the team and the individual player gear up for battle, and that idea inspired Tinker’s process to dig deep and explore that upper panel. We also looked at known Jordan elements like the elephant print in the sole and using a beautiful leather and quality lining package. The idea with this shoe is to keep the inspirations alive. The technology is not compromised at all and that the product is digestible. And it’s still very classic Jordan in its lines. It has a little bit of, dare I say, Italian dress shoe to it, and I think that was something that Tinker was really into. There are some colorways dropping later that will really take advantage of that high-grade patina leather. We will also see some interesting play with color in the leather panels.





資料來源：http://www.nikebiz.com/  http://www.nike.com/