Satellites and runners make art for Nike

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Nell Johnson

Any brand strategist will tell you that the sportswear giant Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells an ideal. This kind of approach to marketing often sees Nike leading the way in finding ever more innovative and experimental ways to tell their brand-story.

Their latest project is a collaboration between Nike’s Innovation Lab, well-respected creative technologist Zach Lieberman (Eyewriter, Toyota IQ Font) and interactive design lab YesYesNo. It is a perfect example of a growing trend for big brands exploring the fringes of creative and technological innovation to find new ways with which to engage their customers.

Put simply, the project aimed to turn a runner’s data taken from their Nike GPS-enabled sports-watches into a unique piece of generative art.

Using software based on the OpenFrameworks coding system, Zach was able to import metrics such as speed, acceleration, deceleration etc into a digital manipulation system. The runners were then invited to play with their data using rotation, scale and colour. Each piece of art was then printed out as a poster and etched onto a special-edition shoe-box with their name, location and distance run.

Whilst this has yet to become a commercial reality it is most definitely ‘one in the bag’ for Nike. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see this in your local NikeTown store with a queue of local runners all aiming to create a piece of dynamic art which is unique to them and further cements their affinity to the brand.

Images courtesy of thesystemis.com