Last month we previewed the imminent arrival of Aalto University’s Nokia Design Archive. Today the site opens to the public, with 700 curated entries and 20,000 items in a repository you can browse through via an interface that links the various strands of company history, conceptual design and presentations together.
The Nokia Design Archive at Aalto.fi (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)
‘What we had at the time were phones with black and white screens that could take calls and send a text message. At the time, we were asking: could the mobile phone be something more? What are our wildest dreams for what a phone could do?,’ remembers Professor Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Design Archive and a former designer at Nokia.
We’ve sifted through a few of our favourites from the dawn of the mobile multimedia age.
Nokia 252 in different colours, 1999 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)Hand drawn sketches, Blitz workshop, 1998 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)HumanForm Concept displays, date unknown (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)Nokia Monolith: 'Black handmade model of a communicator with stickers representing keyboard and UI design on the screen' (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)Handmade concept model, 1999 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)Responder phone sketch, 1994-1995 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)Nokia L'Amour Collection Launch, 2005 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)The powerhouse Nokia N95, 2007 (Image credit: Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University)
