A Finnish university has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online collection of photos, videos, interviews, and design sketches from the company going back to the ’90s. Helsinki’s Aalto University launched the online archive for researchers and the general public who want to explore the design process of the company that revolutionised mobile communication.
The Nokia Online Museum
The Nokia Design Archive is launching with about 956GB of sketches, photographs, videos, and interviews from the mid-’90s to 2017. There are about 20,000 items in total, and the research team plans on continually updating the archive. Anyone can now relive Nokia‘s golden era when they made some of the most iconic phones ever seen like the 3310 and 1100, and even some of their quirky experiments like the 7600 and N-Gage that was just too early.
The project is overseen by lead researcher Anna Valtonnen, who worked as a design archivist in a burgeoning Nokia in the ’90s, some of her designs can be found in the archive. She believes that the project, “reveals how designers made visions concrete so that they could be properly explored long before they became reality. It reminds us that we do have agency and we can shape our world — by revealing the work of many people who did just that.”
It harkens back to a time when experimentation was a necessary part of being an innovative tech company. The nostalgia hits extra hard living in an age where most phones are slabs of glass with a monochrome back panel. Those lucky enough to have lived through the peak of human engineering can revisit the process behind the magic. Those who missed it can see what there was to miss. At least now we have something to show our children to teach them about a time when giants roamed the Earth.