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Design on speed dial: Nokia’s creative legacy goes digital
The Nokia Design Archive showcases the history of Nokia’s flagship products and previously unseen prototypes.
Aleksi Poutanen / Aalto University 2024It’s time to relive your Nokia phone memories. Aalto University is launching an online portal that unveils the company's rich design history, including never-before-seen concepts, prototypes and behind-the-scenes insights.
The portal, set to open on 15 January 2025, offers access to two decades of Nokia’s design journey. It features over 700 entries from the former mobile phone giant’s design timeline between the mid-1990s and 2017, showcasing iconic models like the Nokia 3310 and 8810 alongside prototypes, sketches and raw ideas. Visitors can also discover more about the era through designer interviews and presentations.
Beyond the curated materials, managed by Aalto University Archives, the portal includes a repository of 20 000 items and nearly 959 gigabytes of born-digital files. These materials were licensed from Microsoft Mobile, which ran Nokia’s handset operations in 2014–2016, before selling them to HMD Global. The portal aims to shed light on Nokia’s role in shaping today’s mobile technology and consumer culture while serving as a valuable resource for future research into design and consumer trends.
“The material shows how important it is to have an organisational culture where it's okay to try things out and enjoy the process,” said Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Nokia Design Archive. “Especially in these times of change, it is important to understand how we can grasp the world around us and imagine what we could be.
Nokia designer Dale Fryer’s sketches and notes for a clamshell phone.
Nokia Design Archive/ Aalto University ArchivesFocus on people
The archive is the result of collaborative efforts by researchers from design, history and management disciplines at Aalto University. The team highlights how Nokia's design processes reflected our past and utopian ideals around technology, which helped to drive strong adoption among 13–30-year-olds in the 1990s and 2000s and established the company as a pioneer in mobile tech.
“Nokia was in a similar position in the 90s as Samsung or Apple are today,” commented Kaisu Savola, post-doctoral researcher at Aalto’s Department of Design. “These large corporations shape our lives with their products. Technology doesn’t just shape us; we shape technology. When we started the project, the focus was on objects. As we began going through the material, we soon realised that it was about people.”
The archive will also be available for in-person visits by appointment in Finland, where Nokia’s journey began.