In 1997, Nokia Designed a children’s phone that was shaped like Winnie the Pooh. Some 12 years later, the company dreamed of creating a phone that could stretch your wrist and change its appearance as well. These concepts never made it to the public, but they are now available for your viewing pleasure in the Nokia Design Archive.
Launched today, the Nokia Design Archive was developed by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The online portal hosts around 700 exhibits. The full scope of the archive, however, amounts to 20,000 exhibits, so what’s currently available on the website is “just the tip of the iceberg,” says Anna Valtonen, principal researcher of the Nokia Design Archive. Valtonen previously spent 12 years at Nokia, including as head of design research and vision.
Most of the exhibits are from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when electronics became smaller and smaller, and the Internet made mobile computing technology possible. This new era of interpersonal communication began with a decade of wild experimentation at Nokia, where designers were encouraged to consider how this new technology would fit into people’s lives based on their age group, interests and culture. may fit “If you’re a teenager on the American East Coast, what do you want? Or if you’re a grandmother in India, what’s important to you?” Valtonen says.
Archive contextualizes crowd favorites like “the brick,” or Neo’s “banana phone.” Seen in matrixOr even Nokia 5110Where the game the snake Appeared for the first time. It also introduces interesting concepts that have either fallen into oblivion or are hitherto unseen.
Here are some highlights from the collection.
