Nike Air Works 2026: 8 Designers. Philip H. Knight Campus. Air Max Future.

Eight designers. One campus. One shared mandate: redesign the Air Max using 3D printing technology from Zellerfeld and Nike's own engineering team. The Air Works 2026 class gathered at the Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton, Oregon from May 11 to May 14 and the resulting shoes will reach Air Max Day 2027 as limited "friends and family" releases. @baggys.tv was invited to observe. That is not a detail Nike typically extends to outside creators. Thesis: Air Works 2026 is Nike's most explicit admission that the future of Air Max belongs to the people who wear it, and the eight cities represented in this class are a more accurate map of where sneaker culture lives in 2026 than any market research report. ## Eight Cities, Eight Silhouettes, One Compound in Beaverton The class pulls from Beijing, New York, Mumbai, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Shanghai. Marc Su from Beijing. OMI from New York. Diya Joukani from Mumbai. Hatsuki Motoi from Tokyo. Masyn from Los Angeles. YAMS from Paris. Tasnim Chowdhury from London. Jose Wong from Shanghai. Nike did not choose eight variations of the same aesthetic. They chose eight different relationships to street culture, fashion, and materials, and then put them all in the same room for four days. Zellerfeld, the Hamburg-based 3D printing footwear manufacturer that has been rebuilding the production model for the entire sneaker industry, is the technical partner. Zellerfeld makes fully recyclable, fully 3D-printed shoes without traditional tooling or glue. The combination of Nike's Air cushioning engineering and Zellerfeld's printing platform means these eight designers are working in a medium that did not exist as a viable footwear production method five years ago. The constraint is the story. ## PHK Is Not Just a Name Change Nike renamed its Beaverton headquarters the Philip H. Knight Campus in October 2025, honoring the company's co-founder. But the renaming coinciding with a program like Air Works is not accidental timing. Phil Knight's biography is the story of a track athlete and his coach building something from nothing. The Air Works program inverts that founding mythology: instead of one person with an idea, eight people with different ideas all arrive at the same place. Knight started with running. Air Works starts with the question of who gets to define what running looks like next. The designers are not interns. They are not finishing students. They are working creatives with existing practices who Nike approached because their design languages are already developed. That is a fundamentally different recruitment model than a competition or a mentorship. Nike is not teaching these eight people how to design. Nike is giving them access to engineering tools that were previously inaccessible and asking what they would do with them. ## What Comes After the Workshop Each designer will release a limited run of their shoe during the year leading up to Air Max Day 2027. These are not Nike products in the traditional retail sense. They are design objects with Nike engineering inside them, released through each designer's network as friends and family editions. The resale market for these is going to be significant before any of them have been shown publicly. The parallel to Zellerfeld's existing work is instructive. Zellerfeld has already produced collaborative shoes for designers outside the traditional sneaker industry. The methodology translates: limited print runs, direct to community, no retail intermediary. Air Works applies that model inside the Nike ecosystem for the first time. If even two of these eight designers produce something the market responds to, expect a structured Air Works Volume 2 within 18 months. Nike does not run programs that do not scale.