During Milan Design Week 2026, Nike’s global design team unveiled Nike Air Lab inside the newly restored design and architecture centre Dropcity. The exhibition is built entirely around AIR; nearly a hundred prototypes and archival pieces, some dating back to Frank Rudy’s earliest experiments, traced how a single technology has kept reinventing itself for close to five decades.
To unpack the thinking behind Nike Air Lab beyond the exhibition itself, we sat down with Golnaz Armin (VP Nike Global Design Team), Alex Hackett (Nike Design Senior Manager) and Giada Zuan (Dropcity Curator & Project Leader) to explore what AIR means as a technology. Not just cushioning, but a design philosophy that keeps reinventing how Nike creates.
Working closely with Nike’s design team, we carried the concept through every stage of production. From shaping the interviews and capturing the exhibition’s most significant details, to editing and producing the score. The result is a short-form piece that puts the people behind Nike Air Lab front and centre, letting them illustrate in their own words why AIR still matters. Not just to Nike and their community, but to the wider community that Dropcity exists to serve.
Concept
Content Production
Music Production
