New article on the blog.
Some context…
Design is Compromise.
Good Design is knowing what to sacrifice.
Thinking you can magically make everything awesome is for inexperienced young designers and children. It’s fantasy. It’s just not how things work.
Unless you’ve been off the grid, by now you’ve probably heard of the one-time-use Adidas Adios Adizero Pro Evo 1 v2 (someone in marketing really needs to work on that branding). It’s a super light (138g), super expensive ($500 USD) shoe that setting world records. And it’s causing quite a stir, but for all the wrong reasons.
(Yes, again about the Adidas Evo 1)
The founder of Allbirds personally called out the CEO of Adidas over the lack of sustainability. So much for that partnership I guess?
But beyond the hype and total misunderstanding of how running and running shoes work (no, you can’t just “resole” old running shoes to make them good again), there is the idea of compromise. And acceptable sacrifice.
If your goal is performance, everything else (clean sport aside) comes second. In competition, there’s only one first place and you don’t design for second place. A sacrifice for sustainability is not just carelessness. It’s optimizing performance.
The perfect (race) shoe would be one that would disintegrate as soon as you cross the finish line.
Read the full article below. Let me know what you think.
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