A futuristic pocket watch designed for the 2002 film Minority Report. A cell phone inspired by a banana. A wearable device with an unknown purpose. All of these are examples of the fascinating items stored inside Aalto University’s new digital Nokia Design Archive—and that’s just barely scratching the surface of the catalog’s contents.
The online archive, which debuted on January 16, includes around 750 entries representing two decades of the Finnish electronics company Nokia’s design history, ranging from sketches and mock-ups to never-before-seen prototypes and hours of designer interviews. The archive is just a small glimpse into the full Nokia collection donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy (and many former Nokia designers) to Aalto University, the whole of which includes more than 20,000 items and one terabyte of digital files. It’s a rare glimpse behind the curtain at the inner workings of a tech company striving to be ahead of its time (and, often, succeeding).
Nokia’s heyday spanned from the late ‘90s through the early aughts, when the company’s innovative mobile phones propelled it to become the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer. Once Apple entered the scene, though, Nokia missed the initial smartphone train, resulting in Microsoft buying out most of the company’s telephone business in 2013 before selling it again in 2016.
Anna Valtonen, who worked as a designer at Nokia from 1995 to 2008 and is currently associate professor in strategic design at Aalto University, kept in close contact with Microsoft to prevent Nokia’s archives from being thrown away.
“We were promised that we could acquire a lot of this material from [Microsoft], but at that time, it was all a complete mess,” Valtonen says. Ultimately, she was able to acquire Microsoft’s materials, as well as the personal collections of several former Nokia designers, for preservation at Aalto University. But that was only the first step in what would turn out to be a massive, multiyear undertaking—which, she says, felt like “collectively laying out a big puzzle.”
“We had intact prototypes and others that were broken; we had to take out old batteries from phones and try to understand the inspirational material that related to something; [we had to find] sketches, and written documents from meetings, and photography, and video tapes—all sorts of different kinds of items that needed to be put into the archive,” Valtonen explains.
While arranging the full puzzle is an ongoing endeavor, the digital Nokia Design Archive offers a curated glimpse into what Valtonen’s team has uncovered so far. Rather than taking a traditional “box of entries” archive approach, the website is designed like a massive data visualization, which imagines the company’s design history in two ways, as a network and a timeline. In the network view, users can explore a web of entries that have been color-coded and arranged to demonstrate how various branches of Nokia’s history are interconnected. In the timeline view, they can browse through written anecdotes and recorded interviews with designers who worked at Nokia.
The site offers an intimate opportunity to peer into formerly confidential documentation of Nokia’s design process—something that most other tech companies keep under strict lock and key.
“I don’t know of any other collection that would be this vast about something similar,” Valtonen says. “Typically, these are the kind of things that companies keep very tight to themselves. We know that these kinds of practices are happening in organizations all around the world, but it’s not usually the material that you share with people from the outside. That made it really, really unique.”
From a dive into the archive, here are five must-see entries to get you started on your own exploration:
Nokia 8110, “Banana”
Arguably one of Nokia’s most iconic designs of all time is the 8110 “Banana” phone, a cellphone with a sleek profile, curved silhouette, and sliding cover, which was featured in the 1999 film The Matrix.
“Before [the 8110], phones had been basically huge lumps that you dragged along with you,” Valtonen says. In 1994, Nokia released one of the first phones that bucked that trend: the 2110, a small handheld device. But the curved Banana phone, unveiled in 1996, was “the first one where you actually started questioning, Does it need to be straight?” Valtonen says.
Concept model, “3G”
The archive includes a whole section on Nokia’s exploration into possible 3G cellphones in the late ‘90s, which was several years before any mobile phones could actually connect to the internet. These concept models sold the exciting promise of activities such as reading an email on your phone, or maybe even sending a photo (gasp!).
Valtonen notes that Nokia’s designers were imagining these potential 3G devices at the same time that the Banana phone (with its diminutive screen and large keys) was actually in production. The 3G concepts, then, dream big with large screens and out-there forms—including teardrop shapes, one strikingly egg-adjacent model, a prototype with an accompanying stylus, and even some horizontally oriented phones with no keys at all. These prototypes weren’t necessarily intended to go to production, but rather served as a springboard to consider what might be possible in the future.
“The 3G concepts were there to really create not only a discussion from within the company, but to create a discussion globally in the market of, ‘What is this future way of communicating with people? Could we want to share something with our friends, with an image? Or could we actually want to talk to someone face-to-face?’” Valtonen says. “That was completely outrageous [at the time].”
Virtual glasses
More than two decades before Apple introduced its Vision Pro headset, the designers at Nokia were imagining a future of virtual eyewear. One concept mock-up from 1999 shows a pair of mirrored purple glasses, clearly inspired by the y2k aesthetics of the day. In another mock-up from the same era, the glasses take on more of a visor quality. An accompanying presentation called “Vizor Concepts” lays out the designers’ thinking about how such an innovation might be used, including sections on “entertainment,” “communication,” and “sense enhancement.”
Aside from virtual glasses, Nokia’s creative minds were considering a whole range of other wearables well before anything similar actually came to market. One entry titled “Sketches, ‘Elements: Blitz’” shows early drawings of a potential smartwatch; the concept pocket watch Nokia 8580 (which was actually created as a prop for the film Minority Report) imagines a kind of smart pendant; and a series of unnamed devices show designers working through hands-free listening concepts.
According to Valtonen, these wearable concepts are a prime example of how Nokia encouraged its designers to ideate purely for the sake of creative exploration.
“It’s about daring to do things which are not even meant to be produced, but actually created, in order to start a discussion of, ‘Could we do this, and should we do this?’ That’s extremely important now, when we are facing this new wave of AI technology.”
Hotel Garbo and the Nokia 7600 “Mango”
Throughout the archive, there are plenty of internal presentations that illuminate how Nokia’s consumer research impacted its product designs. One such document, titled “Hotel Garbo – 2004 Fashion Collection” was made with the mission to “Create stylishly provocative, yet seductive, mobile communication experiences.”
An exhaustive list of inspirations for the aesthetics of these potential devices included “Hollywood ‘20s to ‘40s, old black and white photography/cinematography, old newspaper articles about the scandals of the rich/famous/beautiful, historical cosmetics labels and packaging, American old school gangsters (Al Capone etc).” Designers pulled direct inspiration from the fashion industry at the time, noting a focus on monochromatic palettes, dramatic silhouettes, and sculptural details.
Ultimately, Valtonen says, the “Hotel Garbo” brainstorming led into an actualized product in 2003: the Nokia 7600 “Mango,” a cellphone with an avant-garde asymmetrical shape (and, at last, a camera!).
Unknown model
Perhaps the most fascinating subsection of the archive is its mysterious “unknown” designs, whose history—and sometimes even purpose—has yet to be uncovered. A quick search of “unknown model” will yield dozens of drawings, concepts, and prototypes that lack context, including several devices that look more fit for alien use than for humans.
As Valtonen’s team continues to work through the archive and speak with former designers, she says, many of these mysteries are sure to come into clearer focus.
“When it says ‘unknown’ somewhere, that just means we haven’t come that far yet. That’s also the beauty of this project—that we’re not sharing it as a commercial site, it’s not a service, it’s not polished or finished. We’re really opening up the first starting points of a larger research effort.”
