“Yesterday, the selected participants of the Flyknit Challenge started their day with a run with London 2012 athlete Andrew Howe and Gold Medal Venuste Niyongabo, in order to understand the needs of the runners and experience running in the city.
In the afternoon, a workshop on the three benefits of Flyknit was giving them the opportunity to get all necessary insights and knowledge in order to shape an ultimate design project for the runners of Milan.
The brief of the workshop was :
‘Based on what you’ve learned from your run and the workshop session, we’re asking you to draft a project where design and innovation meet with running in Milan. This project should be inspired by the 3 benefits of Flyknit: LIGHTNESS, SUSTAINABILITY AND FORMFITTING. It should be replicable easily for the running key spots of the city’.
Designer Odoardo Fioravanti, Carlo Antonelli (editor-in-chief of Wired magazine), Joseph Grima (editor-in-chief of Domus magazine), Ben Shaffer (Nike innovation director and designer of the Nike Flyknit), Martin Lotti (Nike creative director on the London games) and Neville Wakefield (curator of the Flyknit collective project) were leading the conversation, feeding the participants with contents, story telling and driving them to unexpected thoughts through brainstorms around the concepts of lightness, sustainability and formfitting adapted to the fields of creativity and design.
Participants have now until 4PM on Saturday to bring back their contributions. At 6PM Nike and Odoardo Fioravanti will announce the names of the selected participants. On April 28, only one should remain and the selected participant will work on its project under Odoardo Fioravanti’s tutorship between May and the end of July. Then, the project will be executed.”