At the wheel of Swedish automotive manufacturer Polestar’s colour and materials team, Maria Uggla is redefining what car interiors can be – ethical, sustainable and anything but conventional.

Design instinct runs deep for Uggla. Her visceral reactions to art and design act as her own inbuilt compass guiding her to true north. 

“I tell my team that if they are working on a design and they get this heartbeat, then they are on to something,” she tells ADR, gesturing to a fluttering heart.

This intuition has followed her through a 30-year-long career from Electrolux to Volvo and now Polestar, a former sub-brand of Volvo.  

A Scandi beginning 

As a student, Uggla trained in industrial design in Sweden, where she noticed a difference between her and her classmates. 

“[During] the first years, I only had male classmates,” she says. “They had a strong focus on automotive, and I was very much a climate activist and didn’t want to be connected to cars at all.” 

Uggla was serendipitously steered toward automotive design after returning to Gothenburg from Stockholm, where a chance encounter encouraged her to apply at Volvo. There was an immediate compatibility. 

“From day one, I loved it,” Uggla says. Automotive design felt like a perfect mix of product and interior design, bringing together several components as a whole.

Her environmental advocacy origins later led to a natural fit with Polestar, where Uggla’s strong sustainable design approach would push environmental consciousness and challenge industry norms for the electric car producer. Uggla now calls it a “privilege” to work in this space, combining her passion for sustainability and design “in all forms”.

An interdisciplinary design approach 

Uggla’s unique approach to design has allowed her to forge innovative designs for electric and luxury cars. High-end fashion, art, music and Scandinavian nature are some of the unorthodox sources of inspiration she channels into her designs at Polestar. 

Uggla’s latest design for Polestar 4 uses soft tech inspired by the sportswear and fashion industry. The Colour and Materials team looked at a particular knitted material used to make the Nike Flyknit trainer, after Uggla noticed its ability to create and “merge seamless structures”. The team then collaborated with the Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Boras to develop a mesh textile made from recycled polyester yarn that would be used to upholster the car’s interior. 

“It feels very relevant for the time we are in now,” she says. 

Uggla’s aversion to imitation is apparent across her creative process at Polestar. “We don’t pick things from the shelf, we develop [them] from scratch,” she says. Even when selecting a colour, her team will “mix it until perfection”. 

The company’s signature Scandi minimalist aesthetic is complemented with “high-end, quality materials”, she says. Everything is “extremely thought through”, right up to the suppliers and manufacturers of materials.

A move to fully recycled materials 

Uggla has long championed a new standard in automotive design, advocating for sustainable and net-zero impact as a given, rather than a trend. 

“I don’t like how people try to make things look sustainable,” she says. While consciously manufactured, Polestar designs should be conceptualised to look “cool and modern”, according to Uggla.

She stresses that sustainability should not be an “add-on” for other companies. “I used to say that, in the best of worlds, we [won’t] even need to mention it in the future because it should be the new normal.”

For Uggla, consideration and consciousness are among her top design guidelines. She has fought strongly against the use of virgin materials, shifting the industry toward fully recyclable textiles. 

After initially being told it wasn’t possible to produce her elements of Polestar 4 using 100 percent recycled materials, she was encouraged to opt for 10 or 20 percent. 

“I didn’t take no for an answer,” she says. While this didn’t happen overnight – it took time to reach an agreement – Polestar 4 is a testament to Uggla’s strongly-held belief in sustainability and the conscious practices of her team.

Animal welfare is also among her “10 rules of design”. Uggla and her team considered leather alternatives to find an ethically and environmentally conscious next-generation skin-like material, leading them to trial leathers made from pineapple and apple. Strict industry regulations surrounding durability meant the fruit leather was not considered mature enough. Instead, the team opted for an ethically conscious Scottish supplier, which provided a chrome-free leather. This supplier sources hide from farmers in the UK and Denmark, where “they have the highest standards of animal welfare and traceability” that would otherwise go to waste.

Hope for a truly sustainable design future 

The urgent need to reduce the environmental impact of design propels Uggla’s passion for circular practices.

“Now is the time when action needs to happen,” she says. 

She encourages designers to remain “open and curious”, allowing for the possibility of unexplored ways to consider and improve sustainable design practices.

Regarding the front-end emissions of design, her goal is to reach net zero. 

“People need to start to explore new possibilities and rethink how to make material in a sustainable way,” she says. “I think to be truly sustainable, what needs to be solved is how to create clean electricity.”

Photography supplied by Polestar.

Related: Read our recent profile on another industrial designer, Vincent Tsang from Vert Design.