DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

You would have to be living on a different planet to not realise that it’s the Football World Cup at moment. There is football frenzy everywhere (well, here in the UK at least) with flags being flown, football songs being chanted, pubs bursting at the seams when England is playing and not to mention vuvuzelas being blown (yes, some have made their way to our shores already!). However, the most breathtaking exhibition of the ‘beautiful game’ has to be in the Carlton Centre Mall atrium in the centre of Johannesburg where Nike’s Ballman has taken up residence for three months. This footballer is 21 metres tall, weighs 4.75 tonnes, is made up of 5,500 Brasil skills balls and is strung together by more than 10km of cable. If Nike’s ambition was to create an impact and draw attention to its brand, it certainly has achieved that.

However, when the concept for it was conjured up by Andy Walker, global creative director of Football Nike, and his team over at Nike Brand Design in Amsterdam they were told by a number of people that it couldn’t be done on such a huge scale. Walker then turned to Mike Ratcliffe, the design director at Leicester-based design agency Ratcliffe Fowler Design, who he had previously worked with on a number of projects in the past, who instantly said that he could take on this challenge of bringing the gargantuan sculpture to life.

The initial 3 metre tall prototype was scaled up and pre-built at Magna Science Adventure Centre in Sheffield before being shipped to South Africa. “Magna was the only structure in the UK that we could find tall enough to actually hang it in,” explains Ratcliffe. As the Carlton Centre has its own rigging structure, the designers had to build a substructure to go under that. “We built our own rig which is then fastened to their sub rig and on top of that sub rig is effectively a football pitch size (20 metres square) aluminium sheet and in that is laser cut a hole at every drop site, and there were about 570 drops. So, effectively you have a 20 metres square rig with holes that relate to the plan view of the Ballman himself,” adds Ratcliffe.

Read more…