There is a “Universal Law of Sports Technology, which says unequivocally that you can build something infinitely light or infinitely strong but not both; that there are I-beams and there are feathers, and you can’t build one from the other.”

This is the premise that big sports companies like Nike, Adidas, and Speedo are trying to bend/break in the race to develop better sports performance technology for the Olympics. Because the difference between Gold and Silver can be determined by a fraction of a second, an athlete with a slightly lighter shoe or slightly faster swimsuit can make big impact.  Fast Company has a great article on the R&D efforts these brands are putting forth and the innovations that come from them.

You should read the whole article if you find the design process of innovation compelling, but even if you don’t you will have to appreciate Nike’s game changing new technology: Flywire. Nike representative Sean McDowell describes it like this:

A normal shoe takes pieces of leather and mesh and stitched them on to the shoe. We’re comparing that to building stone bridges and this is more like a suspension bridge. These cables here are made of Vectram thread. You could pull it and it would cut your finger before it snapped. It is very strong cable but in a light minimal way.

The result is an ultra-light shoe with a support system that many of the test athletes describe as feeling like a second skin. When Kobe Bryant tossed the prototype for his Flywire shoe (above) in the air, he wondered if it would come down. With all that going for Flywire the outcome might not even be as revolutionary as the process of making them.

Flywire lead designer Jay Meschter’s stroke of genius was to stop thinking of a shoe as something assembled and start thinking of it as something that is, well, printed. When Meschter connected the two ideas of filaments and strength, his mind leaped to embroidery machines, which, he realized, print out lines and shapes using colored thread stitches rather than ink.

“When we worked out the kinks,” he says, “we realized what makes this so exciting: This embroidery machine is literally a printer for shoes. Most of [a Flywire shoe's] design can take place in a computer; you make decisions on-screen about where you’re placing reinforcement, and then you trial the shoe as a ‘printout.’ ”

No more laboriously handcrafted one-off prototypes. No more fabrics painstakingly selected for the right blend of weight and strength. Now, if a new shoe needs tweaking, all a designer has to do is add another filament to the design and hit PRINT.

The impact of Flywire could be huge. There have been rumors that the new technique is so inexpensive it could allow Nike to return some of its manufacturing to the United States from China, the company’s largest manufacturing and materials source, drastically reducing labor and manufacturing costs.

For more on the process of developing Flywire check out these vidoes;

[ Sean McDowell quote from shoeguide.co.uk ]