Unprocessed luxury
We tend to think of luxury as an experience consisting only of positive elements — ultimate, curated comfort and freedom from limitations. Mainstream luxury vehicles offer just that: cocoon-like environments, where technology isolates users from discomfort — but also from the richness of life. Could luxury mean immersion in life, not escape from it? This collaboration project with ZEEKR explores a new approach to contemporary luxury automotive design reframing luxury as "an elevated experience of human existence". In a world optimized for ease and control, raw experiences that don’t obey us, or even hurt us has become rare. What resists you, talks back, — a rock, a storm — makes an experience feel more real. In this digital age, friction is the mark of the real. In my thesis project, pain, resistance, and unpredictability aren't obstacles to luxury — they are the Unprocessed Luxury.
Designers and brands have a huge responsibility in what type of consumption patterns they make attractive. I looked into the psychological connection between resistance of the analog world and subjective well-being, which as of yet has not been widely explored in design. Well-being is not the absence of pain. Luxury is not the absence of discomfort. Comfort and niceness has no intensity — they leave no space for profound emotion or catharsis, without which luxury becomes shallow.
This concept is targeted at an emergent, new type of humanist luxury customer looking to embrace life rather than escape it. Who values autonomy, vulnerability, the deep engagement with uncurated experiences, and the temporal stability of the analog.
The design process began with identifying key values of the physical world and translating them into visual expression, looking at brutalism and nature's rawness as core inspirations. Materials were used with as little processing as possible — both to reduce environmental impact and to celebrate the richness of their imperfections.
The result is a manifesto and form language: a contemporary exploration of luxury expressing the desire for deep presence and engagement with the real — rejecting the convenience, excess, and interference of the digital.
In collaboration with:
