Former Nike chief innovation officer John Hoke‘s unrealized dream of designing furniture has become the anchor for a special creative project between A Magazine Curated By and the Beaverton-based sportswear giant.

Launching during Salone del Mobile.Milano in Milan next week, “A Manual for Living Curated for Nike,” a nearly 200-page special issue, looks to condense more than 50 years of Nike’s sport science, design and innovation into an experimental guidebook that the brand is also using as a touchpoint for its wider exhibition, talks and workshops during the design week.

Hoke, who retired last year after more than three decades at Nike, was asked what he would have wanted to create but never had the chance to during his time at the company for this project.

His answer, “furniture,” sparked Nevermades, a project in which Nike’s digital creation studio and designers developed two prototype chairs, called “chA.I.R,” a playful nod to Nike’s signature cushioning system.

According to the magazine’s editor in chief, Blake Abbie, those chairs were created to push the public to consider how far Nike’s technology can stretch outside of the confines of the sports space. The miniatures and designs for these prototypes will be in the exhibition in Milan, and the scale works will be presented to the public later this year.

The furniture pieces set the tone of Desire, one of the special projects five sections, along with Mind, Body, Soul and Imagination. The project is conceived as a workbook-style object, complete with exercises and prompts, rather than a traditional brand book.

Abbie said it all began with the question: If Nike were a person, how would it think, dream and move through the world?

“Nike had a presence during the Winter Olympics, and we thought, why not find a way to continue their story in the city. As we developed the issue, we realized that the approach was to understand how Nike thinks about design and how that might impact aesthetics and innovation. Nike has never opened its doors to external voices in the way it did with this issue,” he added.

In the Mind section, writer Nicholas Schonberger looked at the “language of style” and the feedback loop between sport, streetwear and culture, alongside a team design challenge led by Martin Lotti, Nike’s chief design officer, and Golnaz Armin, vice president, Design Studio Excellence.

A personality quiz built on Nike’s color system is paired with reflections from artists Maia Ruth Lee, David Benjamin Sherry and Jason Baerg, while Nike chief science officer Matt Nurse and Stanford neuroscientist Poppy Crum contribute perception exercises.

The Body is focused on rituals and performance, with a fashion editorial produced by top Chinese creatives reimagining pre-competition archetypes. This part comes with athlete-focused recipes from renowned chefs, including Fredrik Berselius at the two-Michelin-star restaurant Aska in Brooklyn, Jason Liu, owner of the buzzy Shanghai restaurant Ling Long, and chef and authors Sohla and Ham El-Waylly.

In Soul, Hoke reflected on time and what sport reveals about life, while architect Jayden Ali, Populous’ Chris Lee and Tottenham Hotspur forward Lenna Gunning-Williams explore stadiums as quasi-sacred spaces. There is also a discussion between Nike vice president Janett Nichol and three creatives, followed by a portfolio by Land Art pioneer Lita Albuquerque, structured around the Fibonacci sequence.

The closing Imagination section features two-time Olympic gold medalist Ashton Eaton in conversation with Tobie Hatfield, an Athlete Think Tank in Tokyo, where elite women athletes map their role models and legacy, and a climate-conscious comic by Geoff Manaugh, inspired by Nike planetary physicist Eric King.

Abbie said the issue, in a sense, reflects how Nike solves problems.

“Nike is a design brand,” he said. “Taking a problem and seeing how best they can approach a solution to that problem is a fundamental tenet of good design; it is a way of thinking. Through this issue, we wanted to understand how Nike would approach different problems and understand their design, thinking whether that’s applied to their own work for athletes or whether it’s for something that they never would’ve even thought about.”

Nike’s Lotti touted that the project showcases the brand’s willingness to “collaborate, ask big questions, and do hard things, along with our capacity to find — or create — beauty and meaning in the world where it doesn’t already exist.”

“To create this issue, we brought A Magazine Curated By into the fold and gave them unprecedented access to Nike Design and Innovation. Through this way of working, we arrived at a new perspective on Nike and the creative process. Over a year, we were able to go broader and far deeper than the superficial. Ultimately, the manual is a design object in and of itself, but I would say the key design piece is the methodology it proposes,” he added.