If you’re born before the 21st century, you are probably familiar with Nokia and its feature phones with many shapes and sizes. As the biggest phone maker at the time, the Finnish-based company wasn’t shy from making exotic designs, and many of them will now be forever immortalized with the launch of Nokia Design Archive.
Nokia Design Archive
Finland-based Aalto University recently announced its launch of the new website called Nokia Design Archive, and here lies several hundreds of ‘curated’ historical records from the company, including photographs of popular and unreleased models, concept sketches, presentations, interviews, past employees, and more. Everything is freely accessible to the public, and there are quite a few things that was perhaps too wild even for Nokia’s wild imaginations at the time.
“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 Prof. Anna Valtonen. “The archive is one of the first opportunities we have to see the work that every organization does behind-the-scenes.” In its press release, Aalto University says more content will be added to the Archive over time.
Today, Nokia no longer makes phones – the company has since transitioned into a fully-fledged telecommunications company focusing on advanced network technologies and researches. The final years of its handset business was bound on a downward spiral as it failed to fend off emerging competition on the smartphone market, and later attempts with Microsoft’s help (which it later sold its business to) proved to be unfruitful. Years later, the brand was revived with the help of another Finnish brand, HMD, comprised of ex-Nokia employees.
(All images in this article are sourced from Nokia Design Archive by Aalto University.)
Pokdepinion: Very rarely we get the chance to see how new products came to be in the tech industry, especially to this degree.
