Rediscover Nokia’s masterpieces from the 90s with this new design archive

Accessible online, the Nokia Design Archive curated by Aalto University offers a unique insight into the history and mobile phones of one of the most important technology brands of all time.

On January 15th, the Helsinki-based Aalto University will officially launch the Nokia Design Archive, a digital portal to showcase the famous Finnish brand's history and inner workings.

The digital collection, curated by the Aalto University Archive, will consist of more than 700 entries from the mid-90s to 2017. The selection is just a start and follows the acquisition of about 20.000 archival objects from Microsoft. Researchers from the Aalto Archives plan to keep curating the archive by adding more entries in the future. The goal is to document Nokia’s evolution and history and understand the long-standing impact of the brand on global consumers and competing companies.

Dale Frye, Sketches and notes for a clamshell phone, 1996. Nokia Design Archive, Aalto University Archives

“In Finland, we have a tradition of being open with big data sets. The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society?” says Anna Valtonen, Lead Researcher at the Nokia Design Archive. “From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material we need more of. We had a van full of the history of Finnish design, unarchived and in disarray. The material shows how important it is to have an organizational culture where it's okay to try things out and enjoy the process. 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.”

The news of the Nokia Design Archives launch comes at an unfortunate time for what remains of the Nokia brand. In the past few days, the current owner of the smartphone brand, Chinese manufacturer HMD, has silently discontinued all its Nokia-branded products in favor of its HMD-branded smartphones. It's unclear whether we'll see any other Nokia smartphone soon. This Nokia is not to be confused with the other still existing Nokia, which is a Finnish corporation active in the B2B telecommunications market.

 The archive will be available at www.aalto.fi.

Latest News

Latest on Domus

Read more
China Germany India Mexico, Central America and Caribbean Sri Lanka Korea icon-camera close icon-comments icon-down-sm icon-download icon-facebook icon-heart icon-heart icon-next-sm icon-next icon-pinterest icon-play icon-plus icon-prev-sm icon-prev Search icon-twitter icon-views icon-instagram