
Aalto University in Finland, the birthplace of Nokia Mobile Phones, has launched an online design archive for the devices.
“Every large global company is trying to understand what drives people, how we see the world around us — but you don’t want to let anyone else in on this thinking. It’s so important, but it just doesn’t leak,” says lead researcher Professor Anna Valtonen. “The archive is one of the first opportunities we have to see the work that every organisation does behind-the-scenes.’
The Archive’s digital portal holds a wealth of sketches, photographs, presentations, interviews and more, spanning the ‘golden era’ of a company that once laid claim to almost half the global market share in smartphones.
The latest Nokia phones are made by HMD and license the Nokia name.
Visualisations and expert analysis guide visitors through over 700 curated entries spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 — with an uncurated repository containing some 20,000 items and 959GB of born-digital files. The content is licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes when Nokia’s handset operations were put to rest and the brand relaunched under a different parent company.
Valtonen was herself involved in archiving design processes at the company over 20 years ago.
“What we had at the time were phones with black and white screens that could take calls and send a text message,” she said. “At the time, we were asking: Could the mobile phone be something more? What are our wildest dreams for what a phone could do?”
The Aalto University researchers behind the project include designers, design historians, and organisation and management scholars, each bringing their own expert lens to the archive and its contents.
“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,’ says design historian Kaisu Savola.
“The archive, and the research going on around its contents, challenges the idea that technologies and their formulations are hidden away in black boxes, only accessible to experts or the powerful. At the moment, there is not enough creative exploration around our options — like they were doing at Nokia — or discussion that really considers people’s different needs and concerns, not just the interests of global corporations or governments,” says Prof Guy Julier.
As debate on the impacts of social media as well as developments in artificial intelligence take centre stage, Julier hopes that the project will inject some much needed imagination into global discussions.
“The archive reminds us that technologies don’t magically come into being, but are explored, envisioned, prototyped and tested not just by designers, but as part of an enormous professional operation,’ he said.

The Nokia 7373 which was released in 2006
Current work on the Nokia Design Archive is just the tip of the iceberg, with researchers hoping to both develop and add to its contents over time.
‘In the early ages of Nokia, there was a genuine wish to understand people, how they live, what makes them tick,” said Valtonen. “Now we’re at a similar point of societal transformation with AI. We need to get people thinking about what could be.’
The Nokia Design Archive’s digital portal is freely accessible to all for research and education purposes. The Archive has been made possible by donations from Microsoft Mobile Oy and designers and by funding from The Research Council of Finland and the Kaute Foundation.
