Fuel Band Designer Joins iWatch Team
Ben Shaffer (design director at Nike) is rumored to be now working for Apple. of the details behind Shaffer’s departure. Shaffer’s was Nike’s Studio Director of the Innovation Kitchen (Nike’s R&D department). Shaffer’s department creates new product designs and in the past years it helped Nike win the ‘mot innovative company in 2013′ award by Fast Company. Among the products created by Innovation Kitchen, there are the Nike Fuel Band, and recently the Flyknit shoe.
Shaffer’s experience designing wearable products will be very valuable to Apple as the Cupertino based company is developing its own wearable smartwatch. The Nike Fuel Band is very popular among Apple executives such as Tim Cook (Apple CEO and Nike Board member). It is safe to say that given Nike Fuel Band’s popularity with Apple executives, Apple’s own smartwatch will include similar fitness tracking features. Which is consistent with Apple hiring fitness expert Jay Blahnik.
In a recent interview with Fast Company, Shaffer how Flyknit was not just about the end product, but also about the processes involved in the product’s design: ” What makes Flyknit so truly disruptive is that it isn’t a shoe–it’s a way to make shoes. As the team members who spent four years developing the technology like to say, they’re “breaking the sewing machine.” The old Nike model involved cutting rolls of prewoven material into pieces, and then stitching and assembling them. But with Flyknit, a shoe’s upper and tongue can be knit from polyester yarns and cables, which “gets rid of all the unnecessary excesses,” says Ben Shaffer, studio director at the Innovation Kitchen, Nike’s R&D center. The Flyknit Racer, one of the first shoes in the Flyknit line, is 5.6 ounces, roughly an ounce lighter than its counterparts. Nike uses only as much thread as it needs in production, and the shoe can be micro-engineered–tightened here, stretched there–to improve durability and fit“.
Apple is a company that spends a lot of time with research and development; before a product is released, there are hundreds of prototypes tested and just as many design changes. In fact, Apple devices spend years in the ‘design development’ phase. From the same interview, it is clear that Shaffer has a similar design process as Apple’s design group: “Shaffer shows me some of the 195 major iterations the Flyknit went through as we tour the Kitchen. Some appear as rudimentary as a ballerina’s slipper. The prototype that marathon runner Paula Radcliffe marked with scribbles now looks like a rejected Project Runway design. Nike’s ambitions for Flyknit can be seen in the trays full of feet that live in tall carts around the Kitchen. The disembodied wooden lumps–most generically sized and others made by scanning some of the actual feet of the thousands of professional athletes that the company sponsors–are all waiting to be fitted, like Cinderella, with the perfect prototype shoe“.
Regarding collaboration efforts with other designers, a 2013 interview with Shaffer explains: “For the past five years, Ben Shaffer has been a part of Nike’s famed Innovation Kitchen where they are encouraged to think, experiment, research, build, and question things with one ultimate goal–to help their athletes achieve their goals. As the lead designer on the Nike Flyknit Trainer+, Shaffer worked closely with Hiroshi Fujiwara, Tinker Hatfield, and Mark Parker to produce this latest sneaker. We had a chance to speak one-on-one with Shaffer in an effort to gain a better understanding of this amazing new technology“.
This suggests that Shaffer would adapt very quickly to Apple’s design and collaboration processes. In , Shaffer describes his role as Nike’s Studio Director of the Innovation Kitchen. Considering Shaffer’s vast design experience and its high position at Nike it is safe to assume that at Apple he will work under Jony Ive, in his small design group. As Christopher Stringer (Apple designer) explained last year, Apple’s design team literally sits around a kitchen table when brainstorming, and this should give Shaffer a familiar feel.
Based on Shaffer’s previous experience with wearable gadgets, it’s safe to assume that at Apple he will be working on the company’s wearable products. One of Apple’s upcoming wearable products is a watch (dubbed the iWatch) that will mark Apple’s debut on the smartwatch market; however, Shaffer may not work just on wrist wearables as Tony Fadell (a former Apple executive) recently said that Apple prototyped wearable devices similar to Google Glass. It will be very interesting to see what Apple will surprise us with next.
