The other day I came across a cool new innovation from Nike. They've spun up an entire cognitive science department to develop mind-altering products.

Their first such product is called Nike Mind, specifically 001, a slip-on mule, and 002, a lace-up sneaker. At the core of their innovation is the idea that the soles of your feet have long been a fundamental way you sense the environment around you, and that shoes separate you from that environment, leading to dissociation that has measurably detrimental impacts on performance.

In response, Nike Mind 001 and 002 include free-floating balls through the midsole that exert pressure on your foot as you move. These, Nike claims, enhance mental focus and clarity, ostensibly interacting with neural pathways to promote a state of heightened awareness and concentration, as proven by EEGs on athletes wearing them:

This isn't an entirely new idea. For some time now, a relative fringe of health-hackers have made this claim that shoes are having negative health effets, prompting many to switch to low- or no-rise "barefoot-style" footwear or even, for some diehards, to go entirely without shoes in daily life, an unfortunately risky proposition for most environments humans live in.

Interestingly, Nike's solution isn't to have less shoe but to consider the sole as a human interface with cognitive impact.

I appreciate these kinds of physical body interfaces, especially ones that are passively impactful or cybernetic. So often, design feels confined to a screen because software is so powerful that we're conditioned into believing it is the defualt solution.

How might we build more passively mind-altering interfaces that act on our perception of the space we inhabit?