Takashi Sogabe, head of Sony’s Corporate Design Centre, has revealed that PlayStation Vita’s original design was thinner than its final incarnation, though hinted future iterations may trim some of the fat.
"Speaking not only about the PS Vita, we always have a battle between engineers and designers. The original design of the PS Vita, for example, was very much thinner than the current retail product," Sogabe told CVG, during a round-table interview at Sony HQ last month.
"From a designer’s point of view, thinner is better-looking, but the engineers wanted to put all the features in."
Elsewhere, Sogabe also revealed he would have preferred to use metal rather than plastic in the PS Vita’s construction, and said the analogue sticks were not necessarily in the best position from a design perspective.
"Maybe it will become thinner in the future, but the engineers would have to come up with a means to do that. The main effort for me was to make this product happen. The buttons and analogue sticks were perhaps not in the best position from a design point of view, but we felt they were the best solution from a publisher’s point of view.”
"As a designer, I wanted to use metal rather than plastic," he said, "but because there are a lot of antennae in the body, we couldn’t use metal.”
PlayStation Vita launches in the U.S. and Europe on February 22.