Remember when you could throw your phone after sending a risky text without worrying it would break? Long before sleek glass rectangles rendered Nokia’s bold and durable silhouettes obsolete, designers working for the pioneering electronics firm played with all the potential shapes that our brave, unnerving present could someday take.
To honor Nokia’s foundational contributions to the rise of cell phones (and contemporary consumer culture), Finland’s Aalto University is launching the Nokia Design Archive—a database of 700 Nokia sketches, prototypes, and more hailing from the 1990s through 2017. The online resource will go live on January 15, 2025.
Dale Frye (designer), Sketches and notes for a clamshell phone (page4), 1996. Photo: Nokia Design Archive, Aalto University Archives.
Nokia started off in 1865 as a pulp mill, then started generating electricity in 1902. The company’s electronics division formed in 1967. 15 years later, Nokia released its first car phone, and in 1984, its first mobile phone. But, it wasn’t until 1987 that Nokia released one of the world’s first hand-held cell phones—which soon acquired global notoriety, and the nickname “Gorba,” after paps spotted Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev using one to place a call to Moscow from Helsinki.
Only the advent of Apple’s iPhone could unseat Nokia 20 years later. Microsoft acquired the ailing company in 2013, and subsequently sold it off in 2016.
“Mangophone” (Nokia7600) surrounded by designer Tej Chauhan’s sketches. Photo: AleskiPoutanen/AaltoUniversity.
That’s precisely when former Nokia designer and current Aalto University professor Anna Valtonen secured the database’s full 20,000 pieces of source material. That year, a Microsoft Mobile employee called her and said, “You know those archives you were interested in? I’m about to put the boxes out in the street by the dumpster,” according to Aalto University’s director of communications Sarah Hood.
“This was how a treasure trove of real-life objects including the original ‘brick’ and ‘banana’ phones and never-before-seen handmade prototypes, alongside digitally curated sketches, eye-opening market profiling, interviews, videos and presentations made its way into the hands of researchers,” Hood told me over email. Valtonen secured the appropriate licensing, then hopped in a van to pick up the goods.
Render of virtual reality glasses. Photo: Nokia Design Archive, Aalto University Archives.
Over email, Michel Nader Sayun—one of the many experts who helped build the Nokia Design Archive—said it took their team two years to catalog the trove for digital consumption. Historian Kaisu Savola took the lead on determining which pieces proved most interesting.
“There is still a lot of work to do,” Nader Sayun wrote. “Thousands of files in the archive have not been catalogued.” Plus, several former Nokia designers have since donated their personal collections, adding to the 959GB of content already on hand.
Different colourways of Nokia 5110, 1990s. Photo: Nokia Design Archive, Aalto University Archives.
The database pairs iconic models like the Nokia3310 “Brick” with lesser known designs straight out of aughts-era sci-fi, such as the Nokia7600 “Mango” phone. A slide-up phone featuring accents from Italian fashion designer Giambattista Valli appears, alongside renderings of early wearable tech. There’s an unnamed egg-shaped phone that never even reached the market. It’s enough to make you yearn for an era where everything looked a little less… boring.
3rd Generation Mobile Concept Rendering, unknown designer, 1998. Photo: Nokia Design Archive, Aalto University Archives.
“Designers were having fun and finding inspirations all around,” Nader Sayun observed of the disparity between then and now. “Moreover, customization, and segmentation were very important values for Nokia Design.”
So, while cell phone users can’t turn back time, at least we can now properly admire the past.
