Design brief.
WERTHER
Degree Project
2025
The project WERTHER draws inspiration from Goethe’s emotionally driven novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and addresses creative burnout among China's 25 million online writers. It explores how transportation can help overcome writer’s block by stimulating creativity. Through interviews, user personas, and mobility needs analysis, the designer developed a vehicle interior concept tailored for writers. Influenced by the film The Color of Pomegranates and the painting Nighthawks, the project combines rich aesthetics with functional design. The result is a fully autonomous, rental vehicle for 2035, with a lounge-like interior divided into three creatively stimulating zones. The concept suggests that both physical movement and spatial transitions can reignite creativity. WERTHER encourages creative professionals to find renewed momentum through movement, echoing Goethe’s transformation of personal struggle into artistic expression.
Motivation
At the age of 24, Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther in just two months, as a means of coping with his own emotional turmoil. This short novel quickly established his place in the history of Western literature. It is remarkably accessible and intended for a broad audience.
Today, there are approximately 25 million online writers in China, nearly half of whom struggle under the weight of writer’s block. My project, WERTHER, proposes a potential approach to enhancing the well-being of creative professionals who rely heavily on the internet and often face the stress and stagnation of creative burnout. I believe that transportation can be used as a tool to stimulate creativity, and I dedicated myself to exploring this hypothesis through my own creative process during my master’s final project.
Process
Following interviews with individuals experiencing writer’s block, I developed a reference persona and a concise list of their mobility needs. This informed my design exploration, which focused on proposing a complete vehicle interior tailored to these users.
Two main sources of inspiration shaped the aesthetics of this project. The film The Color of Pomegranates, a poetic portrayal of the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova’s life, offered rich visual and metaphorical references for the creative journey. The second was Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, which influenced the balance of elements within the interior and the relationship between the vehicle’s interior and exterior. Handmade sketches, digital illustrations, and 3D modeling supported the development of features and functions aligned with user needs. A storyboard was created to depict the imagined user journey within a hypothetical mobility service and vehicle. A scale model was also produced to present the final design.
Result
The outcome is a concept for a rental, lounge-like, fully autonomous vehicle envisioned for the year 2035. The interior is divided into three distinct zones, each featuring a uniquely designed seat. My research and design process suggest that combining physical relocation—whether within or outside the city—with the mental stimulation of moving through different interior zones could help unlock creativity. Just as Goethe transformed personal pain into timeless art, WERTHER aims to help tomorrow’s creatives transform stagnation into momentum—through the simple yet profound act of moving. Long live creative resilience. Long live the power of literature. With this project, I hope to inspire all creative workers to discover their own version of secular happiness in this world.
Overall key sketch.
Persona: Creative author on writer’s block.
The author makes the entrance into the vehicle.
The author settles in and prepares for the work of the day.
The author leaves the car and explores the destined location.
The author returns to the vehicle and begins intensive writing.
The main driving seat.
