CHALLENGE

The technology was getting more faster and less buggy, but needed to show more progress in what it could actually do. A funding review was looming, and the team had to show more than “the machinery works better.”

Its future possibilities needed to be evident—giving leadership something compelling to evaluate, prioritize, and consider within Nike’s long-term personalization strategy.

ACTION

At Nike NXT, I worked within innovation and technology teams to help take an emerging technology from capability tests to storytelling prototypes.

Rather than simply demonstrating what the machinery could produce, we explored what those capabilities might mean for the people who would eventually use them. The work expanded into physical footwear prototypes carrying layers of aesthetic, consumer, performance, and personalization possibilities—a projection of a future in which the technology already existed and had become part of people's lives.

With each round of prototypes, we gave leadership more to react to. The more there was to discover, the easier it became to read the room, follow what caught someone's attention, and respond in the moment. The objects were beginning to do some of the storytelling themselves.

So when the CEO picked up a shoe, his focus wasn't just on its mechanical production capabilities, but on what those capabilities could do. The object carried multiple layers of evidence and felt experience—a projection of a lived future, with different points of entry for someone to discover, question, and imagine for themselves, before the project lead even opened their mouth.

RESULT

The design initiatives helped secure funding twice, allowing the work to continue.

What had begun as demonstrations of technical capability had become something leadership could experience firsthand. Instead of relying entirely on presentations to explain the technology's potential, the prototypes gave people tangible evidence of what it might become—and something they could use to discuss, evaluate, and make decisions about its future.