1. It’s Got to Be the Sound

“The shoes sounded like a cat that had its tail run over by a bicycle,” Tinker Hatfield said. The designer and I were sitting in white Kubrickian cube seemingly airdropped into the middle of the Mia Hamm building on Nike’s Beaverton, Oregon campus. The walls were lined with a museum-style installation of past Nike products that had advanced the idea of fit. Two more shoes of particular note sat on a table in front of us.

The first was the Nike Hyperadapt 1.0, the 2016 sneaker that made real the self-lacing technology Hatfield ginned up in 1989 for Back to the Future II. The second was the object of his squealing-cat scorn, and the reason Nike had flown me and a handful of other journalists to Portland that week in early November: the Nike Hyperadapt BB, which has an electronic self-lacing system both complex and sturdy enough to be worn on an NBA court, which will happen when next-gen stars like Jayson Tatum and DeAaron Fox auto-lace them up this week. I wore a pair of bulky, black laceup boots to my meeting with Hatfield; the quickest way to describe the new Hyperadapt is to say it’s precisely the opposite of those shoes.

The fundamental technology of the new shoe—a battery-motor-and-gears unit in the sole that cinches the shoe’s single fishing-line-esque lacing system down around the foot—means that, as the wearer tightens or loosens the shoe (done either by pressing one of two buttons on the sole, or by using the shoe’s iPhone app), it emits a high-pitched noise. And while there were, presumably, a few thousand concerns more pressing than the sound the shoe makes, Hatfield couldn’t just leave it be. “We didn't want to give it a human voice,” he said. Hatfield has cited the robots from the Pixar film WALL-E as inspiration for the initial Hyperadapt model, and his desire to soften and anthropomorphize a high-tech sneaker recurred: “We still wanted it to be kind of mechanical, but with a nicer tone.”

Tinker Hatfield, Nike's VP of creative concepts.

So the company tasked someone with making the shoe sound good. His name is Summer Schneider; he's a systems engineer at Nike. He set about giving Nike’s newest shoe Hatfield’s requested benevolent-robot-overlord voice. First, he learned from early athlete feedback that they wanted a finer gradation in tightness. The Hyperadapt 1.0 ran at one speed, pulling the laces tight. Now, the BB has two: one, triggered by the wearer holding the "tighten" button on the shoe, that speeds the motor up, and a second, triggered by smaller adjustments, that cranks it at a slower speed. "Because this thing makes noise, we use that noise to convey information to the customer," Schneider said. "Once it goes fast, you take your finger off the button." So the shoe's tightening mechanism emits two tones, and a third to indicate that the battery is low. (The shoes juice up on a large wireless-charging pad.) A while back, Schneider recalled, he had inherited a family piano, and took some lessons. Those came in handy: "I play a bunch of jazz standards," he said, "and know enough about chord structure to find the chords that the lace engine makes." The Hyperadapt BB, it turns out, lives in the key of E-flat major.

Sure, the noise is a little silly. But it speaks to the fundamental question I thought might be at the heart of the Hyperadapt: is the shoe genuine innovation, or just a novelty? The trick is that in Nike’s most boundary-pushing products—the first Waffle Racer, Air, Shox, Flyknit—innovation and novelty are basically inseparable. The sound is essential to the experience of the shoe, up to the point that the Hyperadapt’s persistent whine just might be 2019’s WHASSUP: the kind of branding earworm that companies would kill for. You’ll hear it at the gym. You’ll hear it at the office. And if all goes according to Nike’s plans, you’ll hear it on a Tuesday night on TNT when an entire NBA starting five, preparing to tip off, bend over, hit the button, and cinch themselves tight.

2. Adapt or Die

Sneaker designs usually emerge one way: over 18 months or so, progressing from conversation to sketch to prototype. The initial idea for the Hyperadapt 1.0, though, was Hatfield’s response to a request from Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the director and screenwriter then in the process of putting together Back to the Future II. They’d asked for his help on a scene where Marty McFly’s shoes allow him to stand on the ceiling.

Hatfield, now 66, was then a punkish designer with the Air Max 1 and Air Jordan III under his belt, and he wasn’t having it. “I told them right up front, ‘I think that's an old gag,’” he recalled. It was too campy—or, in Hatfield’s phrasing, “It could never really be what I would call a true futuristic idea.” So he sat down and storyboarded a new scene, one that would set sneakerheads’ hearts aflame. “The idea was that the shoe was lifeless,” he recounted. “And Doc gives Marty the shoes and they're kind of like a lifeless lump. And the idea was once the intended wearer starts to put them on, they perk up. They come to life. It was a gag that came from me thinking, well, wouldn't it be great if shoes recognized you and essentially adapted to your foot?” The appeal, he said, was simple: “It was a concept that I felt like had futuristic content and interest. But on the other hand, maybe could actually happen.”