Product Design: The Vision Of Wii

Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, has started a series of interviews with the folk who created the Wii. Found on their site, the first interview to be published is with Genyo Takeda and Kou Shiota from the Research & Development division.

Iwata starts by marvelling at the Wii and says:

With the final model of Wii in front of me, I cannot help but think, “This could not have been accomplished if we had tried to make a new game console in the conventional manner.”

On rejecting faster & flashier, Takeda says:

If we had followed the existing Roadmaps we would have aimed to make it “faster and flashier.” In other words, we would have tried to improve the speed at which it displays stunning graphics. But we could not help but ask ourselves, “How big an impact would that direction really have on our customers?” During development, we came to realise the sheer inefficiency of this path when we compared the hardships and costs of development against any new experiences that might be had by our customers.

On making the Wii more eco-friendly than the competition, Shiota says:

While you could use such cutting-edge semiconductor technology in order to facilitate [higher performance] extravagance, you can choose to apply this technology in other ways, such as making chips smaller. We have utilised the technology in this way so that we could minimise the power consumption of Wii. If the chip becomes smaller, we can make the size of the console smaller. With a smaller chip and minimised power consumption, Wii can be left on 24 hours a day. This is what I meant when I said that the way Wii makes use of state-of-the-art technologies is completely different from the way in which they are used in other devices.

Wii.Nintendo.com – In-Depth Regional Wii Coverage

[via Nick Baum]