The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2023
Audi and Sabine Marcelis turn Amsterdam's EV charging pole into designed street furniture
Ahead of Amsterdam needing a charger every 21 metres by 2030, Audi and Sabine Marcelis built a pole that fits the city and gives the brand a place in it.
Audi
What it had to solve
The Netherlands is a front-runner in electric driving, but the forecast for Amsterdam is stark: by 2030 the city is expected to need a charging pole every 21 metres. The transition helps the environment while taking over public space, and Audi wanted a presence in that landscape without adding visual noise.
How it works
Electric driving is scaling faster in the Netherlands than almost anywhere, and Amsterdam is where the physical consequences arrive first: by 2030, the city is expected to need a charging pole every 21 metres. That forecast is good news for the environment and a problem for public space, which risks filling up with utilitarian hardware.
Audi and designer Sabine Marcelis answered with a custom-designed charging pole for the city. Instead of treating the charger as an appliance to be installed, they designed an object that fits Amsterdam — the materials, proportions and placement all working to belong in the streetscape rather than interrupt it.
The pole is also the campaign: at the exact scale where charging becomes a daily, unavoidable piece of city life, Audi made the hardware itself carry the brand. The work was recognised at the D&AD Awards and now sits in the archive as an example of designing infrastructure as a brand experience.
Why it lands
- The charging pole is where an electric-car brand meets the city every day — design that object and each charge becomes a brand encounter.
- The design turns a coming wave of street clutter into an owned asset: the pole earns Audi a space in the urban environment instead of buying media around it.
- Audi's presence scales with the city's real need for chargers — infrastructure the municipality will install anyway — rather than with an advertising budget.
- Solving the civic problem of how chargers fit public space is what justifies the brand's place in it.
What it did
Charging infrastructure — the fastest-spreading physical footprint of electric driving — became an owned, designed object instead of anonymous utility, and the work was recognised at the D&AD Awards and filed in its archive.
What you can take
When a market grows into public infrastructure, design the infrastructure itself: the object everyone passes becomes the brand's real estate once it earns its place in the city.
Since then
Audi's pole entered the D&AD awards archive as an example of spatial and product design, framing charging infrastructure as a chance to shape public space rather than merely fill it. As Amsterdam moves toward its 21-metre target, the question the project posed — what the city's chargers should look like and whose they are — keeps it a reference case for brands entering the electric-infrastructure moment.
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