While still recovering from six days and five nights in Barcelona this weekend (which is more like 10, 24-hour days in most other cities–they really know how to squeeze every second out of a day), I decided to kick start my reading and catch up on some lapsed Netflix viewing. A Bottle Rocket colleague, Steve Clements, had recently recommended the documentary series, Abstract: the Art of Design, and last night I watched episode 2, Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design. In the show, Tinker talks about his life and evolution as a shoe designer for Nike, with a focus on his time working on the Air Jordan line. Plenty of context also, including his relationship with Nike founder Bill Bowerman, who obviously had a profound role in shaping his life and career.
Besides virtually all of Spain, Mr. Hatfield has what may be the most amazing life on the planet. From his family, to surfing the Pacific, long boarding and scootering through Portland, working in amazing spaces with smart, dedicated people on one of the world’s most recognised and desired brands. But he certainly earned it. You don’t achieve iconic status without investing heavily and sacrificing. His dedication to doing things his own unique way resulted in some of the industry’s most celebrated innovations and products. Cross training and self-lacing shoes, as well as the Air Jordan line to name a few.
There are several points he makes about design that merit special mention. First, the point of design and designers actually solving problems. The best designers are not people who wander around in some near-hallucinogenic creative state, wrestling ingenious and cool ideas from the ether. They are often deeply analytical people who drive to the root of the issue, problem or challenge and work tirelessly to find an imaginative solutions–often bit-by-bit, hour-by-hour for weeks and months on end. Occasionally, they reframe the root problem in a way that entirely redefines the way we think about what we are trying to achieve entirely, taking the design from an iterative shift to a transformative leap.
Tinker also speaks about helping tell a story. The narrative of sneakers and performance athletic apparel is clearly driven by the story of the signature athlete. And part of his work was interpreting the spirit and legacy of his primary athlete-partner/muse, Michael Jordan.
My favourite line in the episode was near the end when Tinker says, “If people don’t love or hate your work, you haven’t done that much.”
To that I will say, do much.
I’m tired of calling it User Experience. And I don’t think that Customer Experience is a great compromise either. They both tend to encourage thinking about people as one-dimensional objects rather than the impossibly complex design challenge humans actually represent. In the prevailing lexicon, they are either the faceless beings using a piece of technology on which we are currently focused (perhaps worse, the glimmering stock-photoed, impossibly perfect and perfectly shallow personas we engineer). Or they are our customers. Both, the monolithic constructs of unnecessarily limited imaginations.
foreign & familiar 