Polestar’s partnership with The Swedish School of Textiles — located in the city of Borås just a one-hour drive from the Gothenburg HQ — has helped the brand to develop new design techniques. According to Maria Uggla, it’s been crucial to test and visualise design ideas in an agile way and quickly go from an idea to several tangible solutions in a day.
— Having samples on hand and testing them almost in-house enables us to create custom-made materials from scratch, rather than relying on off-the-shelf solutions as is commonly done, she says, continuing,
— Our collaboration is important for us. With their expertise and equipment, and our ideas and creativity, we have been able to explore, innovate and develop new design techniques that we would otherwise never have achieved, including several design details in the Polestar 4 interior. The new 3D knitted Tailored knit upholstery, for instance, uses a production technique that allows us to manufacture the fabric to exact dimensions, which leaves us with minimal waste.
How come you initiated it?
— We think cross-industry collaboration is extremely important to move forward, and we are looking at many different industries for inspiration, such as fashion and sportswear. Compared to the automotive industry, fashion is much quicker at implementing new techniques and processes, so we find a lot of inspiration for innovation there. That is why it’s important for us to expand our reach beyond the automotive sector.
What has been the hardest part of joining forces with academia?
— We think the partnership has been mainly inspiring and has offered a context where we are able to learn a lot that we can incorporate into our work. That is then where the real challenge lies: to go from a brief idea to a producible design in a technique that is new for the automotive industry. For instance when we wanted to translate an expression and a technique that is used in the shoe industry to an upholstery for automotive. We could never have achieved that without the many trials in the flat knit machine and the different smart ideas from the technicians to solve all the problems that we encountered along the way. Collaboration at its best.
Are lifestyle brands ’good enough’ to work with universities, or is there room for improvement?
— While we don’t consider ourselves a lifestyle brand, again it comes back to cross-industry collaboration to push boundaries, innovate, and find new solutions. And there is a huge advantage in taking in the knowledge of other industries when you want to do something unique and unexplored.
— We are a new brand and we as designers have the privilege to create our design expressions from scratch. Our aim is to find a new, more modern take on luxury to design sustainable, minimalistic, thought-out materials. Universities, where research and innovation happen, are excellent partners for cross-pollination.
An ongoing ambitious project for the company is also Polestar 0. It’s described as ”a moonshot goal” and aims to create a truly climate-neutral production car by 2030, which means eliminating all emissions throughout the supply chain.
— Today there are basically no solutions available to produce everyday products without emitting CO2e. And a modern car is highly complex with some 30,000 components from suppliers and sub manufacturers. To reach full climate neutrality throughout the entire value chain is an unprecedented challenge, at the same time as it offers huge potential, not just for our own company or industry but virtually all manufacturing industries, Uggla shares. She adds:
— The project is ongoing and currently in the research phase where we together with partners are working on finding necessary solutions. Polestar 0 should be seen as a catalyst for change. All of the expertise, insights and solutions that we and our partners will gather on our common journey will resonate across the wider business activities and society, and we’ll share more information at an appropriate time.
