AKQA recognised for pioneering AI spatial design and transformative luxury at D&AD

AKQA celebrates six awards at the D&AD Awards across projects spanning luxury automotive, fashion and sport. The recognised work includes reimagined brand and digital experiences for Volvo Cars and Lemaire, alongside immersive AI-powered worlds developed with Nike. Together, the work reflects how AKQA and its partners are using design and technology to create new forms of engagement, unlock growth and build deeper cultural relevance.

The D&AD Awards celebrate excellence across design, advertising, craft and production. Established in 1962, the awards are widely regarded as among the industry’s most prestigious honours, recognising work judged by leading creative practitioners from around the world.

Graphite Pencil, Spatial Design - Use of AI and Technology

Nike The Room

Nike and AKQA transformed a football boot launch into an immersive experience centred on self-belief. Reimagining Kylian Mbappé’s childhood bedroom as an interactive training ground, generative AI brought a young Mbappé to life as a real-time coach guiding participants through a series of challenges. Multi-sensory technology, from heat simulation to vibrating floors, recreated the intensity and mindset of elite competition.

The experience generated more than 60 million views and engagement levels five times above benchmark.

Wood Pencil, Luxury - Spaces and Signography

Volvo Cars EX60 Reveal Event

For years, range anxiety has been a barrier to mass adoption of electric vehicles. All too often, the automotive industry responded with caution, tending to deliver launches that tiptoed around the category’s most persistent anxiety rather than confronting it head-on. The Volvo EX60 launch event instead created a live immersive brand experience built around a single practical illusion: the stationary EX60 appearing to literally never stop. Achieved through the precise synchronisation of a 26-metre screen, robotic turntables and custom-engineered wheels with spinning rims, and staged at Stockholm's Artipelag gallery and broadcast live around the world, it set a new benchmark for what an automotive brand experience could be.

Wood Pencil, Brand Transformation - Ongoing Brand Excellence

The Volvo Cars Safety Standard

For almost 100 years, safety has been at the core of Volvo Cars’ DNA. It has taken many innovative and life-saving shapes, but never been collected under a unifying umbrella. Now, the commitment to protecting lives beyond industry standards has a name and a brand: The Volvo Cars Safety Standard. It moves past branding norms to achieve what Volvo Cars exists to do: making people feel, and be, safer. The system brings that uncompromising approach to safety to life through a typeface designed for instant readability, a colour inspired by high-visibility safety testing, a reinvention of the iconic safety belt, and untold stories from the Safety Centre, showing safety as it has never been seen before.

Wood Pencil, Luxury - Digital

Lemaire Holistic by Design

AKQA translated Lemaire’s design philosophy into a refined digital experience that moves beyond conventional e-commerce. Through curated storytelling, intuitive navigation and a pace inspired by physical retail, the platform reflects the brand’s quieter and more enduring approach to luxury.

The experience established a new digital expression for the fashion house’s distinctive culture and aesthetic.