GOOD IDEAS ARE PERSISTENT IDEAS AND THEY POSSESS YOU.

Inspiration is a funny thing. There is no magic city or store or magazine or book or website. It comes down to your ability to comb through a lot of different things and be able to find the nuggets in those things you’re looking at or experiencing. And then you have to be able to convert those nuggets into an idea. Inspiration doesn’t come in the form of a solution; it comes in the form of an abstraction.

As a creative person, you have to be able to understand enough about the problem you face and be able to convert or translate the abstraction into something else. No designer walks down the street and finds the perfect idea sitting right there in a window. You might see something in a window, but it will be the abstraction that you have to convert to something else.

My parents had mailed us some Asian pears, which bruise easily, so they come in polystyrene nets.

I always carry a sketchbook the size of a dollar bill, along with a Fisher space pen. I carry them wherever I go, including jogging or just walking around. These are the times when my mind is free to flow, and if I see something, I’ll stop and jot it down. I also take pictures with a digital camera or with my iPhone. It’s a form of visual cataloging, and because I’m a visual person, those events are retriggered when I go back to those abstractions that I’ve captured.

When I’m on a run, it’s a great time because I have a free flow of thought. I think I do my best work when I’m a bit solitary and doing something that occupies a portion of my mind that unblocks another part of my mind. I probably have hundreds of thousands of images that I’ve collected over the years and 100-plus sketchbooks, many of which are filled with words or tear sheets. They’re a well of inspiration that is a resource for me. I have some ideas that I’ve never used and some I use over and over. The better abstractions or inspirations nag at you. You can’t put them away. They are there always. Good ideas are persistent ideas and they possess you. When I feel that sense of being possessed, there’s a level of energy that has to come out.

A number of years ago, I was starting to work on blue sky projects for training shoes at Nike. It was around Thanksgiving, and I was home with my family. We received a gift of Asian pears from my parents. The pears were in these unusual polystyrene nets. My son got hold of the nets and starting playing with them, and it got me thinking about the dynamics of this flexible material, and this became the influence for the design of the Air Rejuven8 shoe.

My son kept putting these pear nets on his hands and elbows, and, eventually, his feet. So, here the abstraction presented itself. My son readapted the structural material that is designed to protect this fruit as he put it on his feet and ankles. This showed me that this material flexed with his biomechanics. I told him to stop as I took pictures of the pear nets on his feet.

The upper is a fluid, dynamic system that maps onto the foot and responds accordingly because of the exoskeletal cage that wraps around a pliable upper. It actually gives biofeedback to the foot.

My design team and I found that right balance of geometry and chemistry. It was a very flexible, intuitive system that bends and flexes with the anatomy. This project took years to finally come to life.

We released the Air Rejuven8 with big fanfare at the Beijing Olympics, and it has started Nike on a path of looking at the uppers in a new way. This all came from an innocent child taking an object and reappropriating it. I was able to see that, and how it could be extended into a lot of different things. You have to be willing to look beyond the surface and be able to translate what you see. This is an example of one of those persistent, good ideas that just wouldn’t go away.

The job of the designer is to help predict the future. Designers are part of commerce; we have to be able to show where the business opportunities are and where the point of difference is. What unmet consumer demand is this meeting? We need to move beyond the drafting room and into the boardroom. Can we speak the language of design and business? There is power in understanding business and where it needs to go. Designs are enterprises, not just art projects. We need to think about ideas that are defendable, sustainable, scalable, and profitable.

Creativity is a nonalgorithm, emotionally driven connection to the human culture. You can’t create a map for it, because it’s purely the act of being human. When everything else is digitized or industrialized, creative thought will always be that intangible, uncommoditizable opportunity.