When the design of the NMD S1 RYAT commenced, people were discovering and adjusting to new ways of living. While the shoe was created through a series of 3D prototypes, the design process also sought to reflect the complexities of our present-day reality, incorporating multiple, occasionally contradictory, ideas: material realities and imagined futures, objects of beauty, and tools for performance. The result is a shoe that is sensitive to culture’s ever-shifting tectonic plates, straddling the past and future, individual and community, mountain and metropolis. This is the new performance criteria.