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TEAM TARGET

Roster: Guilherme Lemes, Jesus Garate, Jared Fiorovich and Shaun Kosoy (CMF)

Third day in PENSOLE, another rainy morning in Portland. Today I learned that Portland can have different faces, this morning was a very sad looking day, it was rainy, but then the day cleared up giving us a sunny and fresh day. Today we went over some more sneaker history; in 1984 the NBA banned Nike’s Air Jordan 1. This created what would be a game changing event for the whole sneaker industry. D’Wayne gave us another piece of sneaker history by dropping the knowledge of how Peter Moore was responsible for the Air Jordan 1. Our daily Bruce Lee quote; “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

To the left are boards from previous Pensole students. To the right, a collection of sneakers that D’Wayne designed. Each sneaker tells a story, and D’Wayne has stories for days.

Today’s lesson included D’Wayne giving us a presentation of his career and experience. He gave us a lecture on Product Story Telling. It’s very important in the industry, and I’m not talking just about the sneaker industry but in the design community as well. Usually a product story starts with inspiration, which leads to a concept which eventually leads to completing a design. The story will invite the public into your design. Hopefully this creates emotion that makes people relate to it.

We got to our work stations and continued with our research and building up our design briefs. My team learned that Target has done many collaborations with designers for a good amount of time. As a team we are going to try to use that information as a potential influence for our concepts. This point of the design process is about learning the company’s history, past business moves and directions. From Target’s past we hope to create an iconic future product. I’m also looking at how Target is involved with different organizations that help the community in different ways like encouraging healthy lifestyles and encouraging kids to stay on the road of education. I feel like my design should resemble these characteristics because they send a good message and follows the company’s philosophy. After a couple hours of researching, D’Wayne had a small review with my team. He listened to our ideas and gave us important feedback, he told us to go deeper, to fully understand the company, and to find new ways to stand out from the crowd.

We got back to work. This project gets more and more exciting each day.

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