Author Archives: kmh5138

Running Man

810084982975040498-570x380.jpgA sneaker is a high or low shoe, usually of fabric such as canvas, with a rubber or synthetic sole.   Some consider it to be a piece of art, a way of life, and has many different uses. 

For that reason I will pay close attention to one sneaker company, Nike.  Nike was founded on January 25, 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports by Bill Bowerman and Philip Knight, and officially became Nike, Inc. in 1978.  The company takes its name from Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.  The “swoosh” was actually designed by a female Portland State University student who received a lousy $35 from the founder of Nike. But after Nike became successful they decided to give her some company stock along with a gold ring. The logo represents the wing of the Greek Goddess “Nike” who was the Goddess of Victory.  When first started out they were selling sneakers at track meets and out the trunk of Bowerman’s car.  Bowerman was trying to figure out different ways to make the shoe get better grip on the track.  So he decided to pour some rubber in his wife’s waffle maker. 

nike-waffle-trainer.jpg

From that day Nike has been innovating the design world.  Nike uses various technology in the shoes; Nike Air, Nike Zoom, Nike Shox, Nike +, and Nike Flywire

         Nike Air- a unit of air under the heel used for a comfortable ride while running

 

         Nike Zoom Air-a low profile air unit for responsive cushioning and stability

 

         Nike Shox-absorb impact from heel strike while running; they also “spring back” and add more power to a runner’s stride

 

         Nike +-is a device which measures and records the distance and pace of a walk or run

 

         Nike Flywire-is a thread, composed of Vectran, used in the upper of a shoe. The goal of Flywire is to minimize weight and maximize support.

 

nike-hyperdunk.jpg

Tinker Hatfield is the renowned designer of many of Nike’s most popular and innovative athletic shoe designs, including the Air Jordan III through Air Jordan XV, the twentieth anniversary Air Jordan XX, the final numbered Air Jordan, the XXIII, the 2010 (XXV) and other athletic sneakers including the world’s first “cross training” shoes, the Nike Air Trainer. Hatfield oversees Nike’s “Innovation Kitchen”.  Academically, he studied architecture and graduated from the University Of Oregon School Of Architecture.  He joined Nike in 1981 and in 1985 started working on shoe design.  He realized that his architectural skills could also be applied to athletic shoes.

Nike is infamous for their marketing powers their commercials, iconic, bizarre, and true.  Came out with the famous is it the shoe campaign.  Or most recently using athletes as the marketing tool for something BIG.  Ever since Nike has became a leader in design they have also pushed their ways on to the consumer, for example more cushion is better….wrong.   In the most recent years sneakers have been getting lighter, for example flywire in shoes and 360� Air.  NBA players such as Gilbert Arena, Steve Nash, and more recently Kobe Bryant have worn low-top basketball sneakers because they feel high-tops are restrictive of natural movement and are heavy.

Recently there has been a trend on the rise and it is running…..barefoot.  Some say that we (humans) have been misleading big companies such as Nike that we need more cushioning to run faster and longer.  Christopher McDougall is an American author and journalist best known for his 2009 best-selling book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.  In Born to Run, McDougall goes down to the members of the reclusive Tarahumara Indian tribe in the Mexican Copper Canyons. After being repeatedly injured as a runner himself, McDougall marvels at the tribe’s ability to run ultra distances (over 100 miles) at incredible speeds, without getting the routine injuries of most American runners. The book has received attention in the sporting world for McDougall’s description of how he overcame injuries by modeling his running after the Tarahumara. He claims that modern cushioned running shoes are a major cause of running injury, pointing to the thin sandals worn by Tarahumara runners, and the explosion of running-related injuries since the introduction of modern running shoes in 1968.  Did a study when they went to Kenya to figure out why they always win marathons and this is what they found there .  Nike Free is technology invented by Tobie Hatfield. 

Nike Free attempts to simulate barefoot running while wearing a shoe.  This shoe allows the muscles in the foot to gain strength by providing less constriction; runners are advised to gradually break into the shoe rather than immediately running long distances as to prevent muscle cramps and other discomforts.  The Nike shoe scale goes from 10.0 to 0.0 with a ’10’ being a fully supportive shoe, and ‘0’ being completely barefoot.  Example: The 5.0 Nike Free is like running halfway barefoot, the 3.0 is even less shoe, while the 7.0 is a bit more supportive.

 

 

Sneaker Head

I am a sneaker head so i decided to do my last presentation on sneakers.  There is a lot of design that goes into a simple sneaker and the design process and all that hoop la. The convention is that more is better but a new trend is hitting the market, barefoot running.  Yes, that’s right running barefoot apparently we have been running wrong the last century.  That is what I will be talking aboutU54833_walking_20feet.jpg 

Alive: Playground

Where and where are most peoples’ fondest memories?  Most will say when they were young and had no responsibilities, only homework.  My fondest days was when i was on the playground jumping around, jumping off swings, playing tag, and using it as an obstacle course.playground2.jpg

Now when i first thought of a place that is alive the first thing that came to my mind was a playground, you said to take a picture of one but I didn’t want to be that guy taking pictures of kids at a playground.  So i got all of mine off of the net.  Now, why is a playground alive?  Well, to me its the endless possibilities of what can happen at a playground and for that it is alive to me first of all.  Your moving and with that your blood is pumping you feel invigorated and when you are moving your brain is receiving oxygen.  You feel alive.  When I went to the playground as a kid I saw a lot of kids playing, you were in the zone.  If you didn’t know anyone in you went neighborhood playground and played around to get to know the kids there.

Now, when you i go to most playgrounds where I’m from, there are no kids there.  The playgrounds are rundown and drugs are being sold there.  They are a dead place now.  Or look at a different situation; Japan.  Japan has a declining youth population and playgrounds are empty.empty-playground2.jpgThey are pretty much just empty now because the Japanese are more concerned with work and have been desensitized by the porn industry there.  People are quick to go to porn before they become intimate with a woman.  This was shown to me on current tv and confirmed by my various Japanese friends.  So the playgrounds in Japan are just empty, “dead” space.  The echoes of children playing and swinging on swing is no longer there.  
A playground, to me, is what life is all about.  You see something as it is a create something else with your imagination, creativity at its finest.  You went there had a good time and when it was time to go, it was sad.  it was empty until the next day when all your friends would come back.  It was dead during the night.

Design for Society

I started reading the chapters for Design For Society and in the first chapter it seems that designers are given a lot to think and work on that really doesn’t matter.   I mean in the 1950s I don’t think there was an interest in different kinds of chairs.  Now I didn’t live in the 50s but from the media I have seen from the 50s.  And they mention the use of a teapot and they don’t mention the most important function of the teapot, to handle hot tea!  They completely forgot to mention it.  But I guess that was in that specific moment in time.  I think the book is interesting in that it shows the history that shaped the market today and how both sides of the spectrum had a good amount of input.

The Space Race

The Space race was a heated competition between the US and the Soviet Union.  It was a race to develop the first real world exploration of outer space.  It involved the launching of satellites, sending a man into space, and landing him on the moon.  This time in history occurred between 1957 through 1975 and was a part of the Cold War.  The Origin of the Space Race stems from the missile based arms race that began between the two nations.  The advancement of science and technology translated to military superiority.  The race began initially when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 04, 1957.

In the mid 1920s German aerospace engineers experimented with liquid-fuel rockets capable of reaching high altitudes and traversing long distances.  In 1932, the Reichswehr considered rockets as long-range artillery, because the Treaty of Versailles saw them as long-range cannons and forbade them.  In WWII, Wernher von Braun an aspiring rocket engineer had dreams of flying men to the moon, was employed by Nazi Germany to develop rockets for use as weapons.  In 1942, he became the Technical Director of the Army Rocket Center at Peenem�nde and introduced the A-4 rocket; this was the first rocket to reach outer space.  Immediately after that Germany began mass producing it.  Soviet aircraft rocket engineer was arrested in 1938 during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge and imprisoned for six years.  After his release, he became the USSR’s chief rocket and spacecraft engineer.  In 1945, at the end of WWII, American, British, and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture the German rockets, designs, and engineers.  Each of the Allies captured a share of the available German scientists, but the US benefited the most by recruiting von Braun and many others, who later developed the missile and space exploration program of the US.

The first space shuttle was built in the early 1970s; the concept began two decades earlier even before the Apollo program of the 1960s.  The concept of a spacecraft returning from space to a horizontal landing begins within NACA, in 1954.  Nixon in 1969, decided to go forth with the construction of the space shuttle.  With the decision of Nixon, they decided to build a spacecraft that is reusable since it cost so much for each launch.  For one space shuttle launch it cost around $450 billion and during the space race it cost $1.7 billion to make the space craft.

On September 12, 1962, JFK had a speech at Rice Stadium in his speech he said, “…..For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.  As he said that, now there are problems in Iran and North Korea because Iran has tension in the Middle-East and they want a space program which means nuclear energy, which means nuclear bomb.  North Korea has nuclear weapons and has already threatened to use them.  That is why policies of governing space ambitions must be looked at closely.  Some people judge the US for this but it seems like the right thing to do since they have not used there’s but have used it to advance knowledge for the people.

 

Sources:

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/Urgent+National+Needs+Page+4.htm

 

http://www.newseum.org/cybernewseum/exhibits/dateline_moon/space.htm

 

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/atlas.htm

 

Picture:

 

http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/space/spaceshuttle/space_shuttle_13.jpg

 

Video:

 

Designers

After watching the very interesting documentary “Objectified” last night in class, i left the room thinking……some of the people that design appliances are kind pompous and crazy.  While there are some that are really nerdy ( I mean that in a good way) and calm and completely into their work.  The reason i say this is because as said in the documentary, there is a lot of useless design out there.  How many times does the chair need to be redesigned and it’s still no good.  i love the way the German designer said all of this and lead straight in the most innovative company in recent years, Apple.  I feel like they have revolutionized music apparatuses and the medium in which we listen to it.Another thing that drove me crazy was that designers only design for 10% of the people in the world (well the ones that work for big corporations).  I do not know how true that is but that is just insane, I mean people with no money would kill for a the iPhone.  I usually see people with money trying to hold on to it.  I thought the movie was very informative as to show us some designers and how they got into the business basically from childhood because of an interesting situation that they were in, for example the Japanese designer who peeled potatoes as a child and liked the way they felt in his hand and designed a cool looking cell phone.  I don’t know if it just me but i remember watching a show about top chefs and the chef said if u don’t like the crazy things I cook don’t eat here.  I think designers have that same mentality but those designers are still somehow around and need broke because those designers usually make the crappiest objects that no one buys in the general public.  Designers remind me of these crazy arrogant chefs with wallet busting dishes and no food on the plate, what is up with that?