How Ford's Top Interior Designer Puts the Future in the Front Seat

Amko Leenarts is the Director of Interior Design for Ford Motor Company, creating the interior look for Ford's products worldwide. He spoke with Gizmodo about the design influences, technology, and safety considerations that go into future designs, and later today he'll be in Gizmodo's comments section answering your questions.

Amko has been with Ford since 2012, after a 12 years tour of duty with France's Peugeot-Citroen motor company. The Netherlands-born designer oversees the interior design teams working on Ford and Lincoln vehicles that will be coming out in the next several years.

Check out our interview below, and come back to Gizmodo at 1PM EST today, when we'll be hosting a commenter Q&A session with Amko.

Gizmodo: When you're doing interior styling, how closely are you following trends? Are you trying to make something that looks new right now or are you trying to predict what will look good down the line?

Amko Leenarts: The length of development that we do in cars is one of the longest in the world of industrial design. It varies from three to five years. So we are obliged to watch the meta-trends, but we don't necessarily have to be hyper-fashionable with the latest trends, because usually they go quickly back out of fashion as well. And remember, our cars keep being on the road for quite awhile, so we don't want them to be completely out of fashion within a year's time. However, there are some of what we call meta-trends that happen in terms of cultural environment, certain traditions in the world, obviously that leads us to certain material trends. So the materials that we add to the design have to have some sort of relevance in where the car is sold.

Gizmodo: How do you differentiate a car for the U.S. market versus one that's built for Europe or China?

Amko: That is definitely one of the challenges that I would say in my experience is a little bit unique to Ford Motor Company, since we do make models that are sold all over the world with the same structure and a similar appearance. The challenge that we have as a design organization is to make sure that the design is as flexible as possible so it can handle different material executions. That could mean that we have a variability in the size of the cupholdersthey need to be bigger in the U.S. than they need to be in Europe, while the cupholder in China needs to be more deep but slightly smaller diameter. So apart from materials we also have functional differentiation between the different regions that is definitely a big challenge. And the designs that can handle that variability the best are the ones that we choose for further development.

You can see it very clearly, there are large differences between Europe, America and China, they ask for different materials because their tastes, the cultural references that people have with materials, are different. So to give you an example, in America we have more difficulties to have the American customer accept wood without any lacquer, they want the wood trim really shiny. While in Europe [dull wood without lacquer] is considered as a more high-end solution. So it's that kind of flexibility that we talk about.

Gizmodo: What do you do differently when you're designing the interior for a $15,000 economy car versus, say, a $70,000 luxury SUV?

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How Ford's Top Interior Designer Puts the Future in the Front Seat