Consumers flocked to the new Focus and to the interior that went with it. From a design perspective, the 2012 car was in many ways the antithesis of the original product from 1998: There was simply no way — at least on the base vehicle — to accommodate all the new technologies without adding many more buttons to control all these cool features. The pleasant ’emptiness’ of the first-generation Focus interior had been replaced by a more cockpit-like array of buttons and controls necessitated by all the new functionality given to drivers.
Much was gained, but some would argue that something else was lost.
Enter Ford SYNC (launched on Focus for the 2008 model year). SYNC served to eventually allow designers to resolve the tension between added functionality and increased button-count. SYNC enabled Ford designers and engineers to largely avoid the tension between the busier aesthetic found on the 2008 product refresh and the added controls and functionality the technology overhaul necessitated.
Jump ahead now to the 2015 Ford Focus, launched at the Geneva, New York and Beijing auto shows. The challenge designers faced was how to maintain, or even increase the functionality of Focus, while at the same time simplifying the human-machine interface. How could designers reconcile the elegant simplicity of the original, but still incorporate the super-cool features and functionality of the outgoing car?
The answer Ford’s interior design team would arrive as it took Hegel’s synthesis of design into account.
Synthesis
Here’s how the Design Dialectic evolved: Ford designers reduced the number of physical buttons on the center stack, retook some valuable space for aesthetics, and filled it with…nothing, while continuing to add technology that makes Focus the head of its class with features typically unavailable in cars costing under $20,000.
Like our ability to cope with competing demands, the Focus interior has evolved, from the thesis in 1998 to the antithesis in 2012 and finally to synthesis for the 2015 model. This is the dialectic — the resolution of competing aesthetic and functional ideas — Ford’s design team worked through to create the new, global 2015 Ford Focus. The result is cleaner and more elegant, while at the same time more functional.
