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20 : 09 : 17

Global – Sportswear brand Nike has designed its nine-piece Advanced Apparel Exploration collection using data collected from athletes to inform the design of the garments, a method explored in our Data Designers microtrend. The novel manufacturing method combines motion-mapping with technology that considers the stresses exerted by different urban environments on the body, such as temperature and humidity fluctuations when moving between the street and the office or the nightclub, to create a series of body maps.

These body maps – including an airflow map, sweat map and heat map – are combined into a single data set, which can then be fed through Nike’s knitting machines to manufacture the garment seamlessly from a single piece. ‘Over time, our understanding of the body in motion and new manufacturing techniques have started to converge,’ says Kurt Parker, vice-president of apparel design at Nike. For more on the advances taking place in robotic manufacturing, see our Fast Fabrication microtrend.

UK – The new augmented reality (AR) app, Ikea Place, enables users to visualise the brand’s furniture in their home before they buy. The app automatically scales items based on a room’s dimensions, allowing users to see how the piece fits into a room, and how light and shadows affect the surface of the fabric.

Building on Ikea’s use of AR in its 2014 catalogue, which similarly enabled customers to place furniture in their domestic space by scanning selected pages, the integration of Apple’s recently launched ARKit technology marks a significant shift beyond a gimmick and towards mainstream adoption.

With more than 2,000 Ikea products available in the app, the brand believes it could play a key role in the launch of future product lines. For more on how brands can use AR to drive consumer engagement, see our Insight Behaviour.

London – Designer Brodie Neill’s new furniture pieces crafted from recycled ocean plastic will be displayed in ME Hotel London for London Design Festival. The installation, Drop in the Ocean, is designed from Neill’s ocean terrazzo, a material that he first introduced at last year’s London Design Festival. Made using the same technique as regular terrazzo – a composite material that combines marble or granite with a binder – the three pieces of furniture have been designed to convert waste plastic into something aesthetically pleasing.

‘I want to make people reflect on their use of single-use plastics, make them more aware of their footprint,’ Neill told Dezeen. ‘There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean, so this is a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the problem, but every bit counts.’

Read our Opinion piece for more on how design can be used as a medium to encourage long-term thinking.

New research by Gallup-Palmer College of Chiropractic has found that most American adults prefer to treat physical pain with a drug-free approach. Of the nearly 6,300 people surveyed, 44% viewed prescription drug misuse as a prevalent problem in their local area, on a par with heroin addiction. For more on why consumers are turning away from traditional medication towards digital therapies, see our Smartphone Therapies microtrend.