Well it all began back in November 2011, when we met France Corner and Alex Macintosh from
London College of Fashion, we went in there talking about what is the sustainability vision
of London College of Fashion, and we were just as surprised to hear about how deep the
commitment is within London College of Fashion for sustainability, and they were really surprised
to hear about Nike’s sustainability commitments as well, so we realized there was an opportunity
to do something good together.
The collaboration started really with a meeting of minds, this idea that actually we had shared
ambitions, each of us wanted to be able to find better ways to use innovation through
sustainability for design.
We created an early version of this app, which is now called the Making app, and we wanted
to do a sponsor studio with London College of Fashion so about 40 students could get
involved and use the tool, use the app. The brief was to look at the Olympics, either
2014 or 2016, so winter or summer, and design a collection that might be for a medal stand
or for the Opening Ceremony.
For our designs, we were really thinking about the impact you can make on the world as an
athlete, you know on the medal stand you have this opportune moment to show the world, and
it says something about you. We really want to bring that into the design process and
use materials that also took impact on.
My design was based on snowboarding, and the app really helped in terms of letting you
find a different fabric and fabrics that you may not have heard of before like Polypropylene,
which I’d never heard of before. So the more I used it the more knowledge I gained.
It allowed us to engage with what we were working on on a deeper level, and then find
sustainable solutions because when you look at the app you now have so many more options.
Working with the students was really fantastic, it was really great to be in that role where
you could see them do the research on and get some beautiful imagery, and build up a
story, and see the direction that they were going in. it was really, really great, fantastic,
I really enjoyed it, great project to work on.
So coming to Portland and being at the launch 2020, is just the most amazing experience
in terms of knowledge gain, people that I’ve interacted with, I’ve interacted with a
chemical manufacturing company that I would never usually have access to and people are
so open to collaboration and moving things forward in terms of sustainability, which
is something I was really surprised at. And the amount I learnt has just been incredible.
I really got to see how important sustainability is on a large scale which made me extremely
happy that, you know, big companies are interested in collaboration.
They provided the opportunity for this project which is a very rare thing, so they’re starting
something, and they went to LCF and I was privileged enough to be one of the mentors
to work on the project and it’s a rare company that will bring that to a student level.
I think we’re in a really unique position being part of a university, and I say this
as somebody who has come from working in industry, that we are the people who can actually be
agents for change. Everybody really passionately felt a great sense that they wanted to achieve
through this. I think the fact that each individual student had enough space to be able to create
their own ideas, and those ideas were voiced, and the guys from Nike were able to listen
to everything that anybody said which is a complete unique situation. For an undergraduate
student just coming through the ranks to be able to be in front of a design team, who
get the opportunity to speak to anybody around the world in itself was a fantastic feedback
opportunity.
This sort of open, collaboration platform that was sort of created through this, and
a sense of shared value that everybody got something out of it as well, really created
a very unique opportunity, one that I think is a once in a lifetime for a lot of us.