From brick to banana: The Nokia Design Archive traces two decades of iconic devices

Before smartphones, before wearable tech, and long before scrolling was a pastime, there was Nokia: the inventor of the indestructible ‘brick’ phone, Snake battles and custom ringtones. From the slick silver 8210 to y2k flip phones and the futuristic ‘banana’ – made famous in The Matrix – the Finnish company became a global leader at a time when technology was still finding its place in society.

Nokia didn’t just make phones, it shaped identity. Before iPhones or Samsungs were the de facto choice, mobile phones were an extension of who you were. Nokia made these devices desirable – fashionable, even. It pioneered the idea of tech as self-expression, at a time when it wasn’t about likes, comments or shares – it was about who you were when you pulled your phone out of your pocket.

Now, for the first time, a massive archive of Nokia’s design history from the mid-90s to 2017 will be freely accessible. The Nokia Design Archive launches today, 15 January, presenting more than 700 images, sketches, never-before-seen prototypes, and interviews with designers.

This curated portal is just a sliver of a huge archive that Finland’s Aalto University obtained from Microsoft after it acquired Nokia in 2014. There are about 20,000 physical items and nearly a terabyte of digital files. “In Finland, we have a tradition of being open with big data sets,” says lead researcher Anna Valtonen. “The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society?”

Anna remembers feeling a mix of excitement and dread when a van packed with two decades of design history arrived at the university. Unorganised and overflowing with sketches, meeting notes, and never-before-seen concepts, it gave a fascinating insight into the earliest years of design in mobile technology. “The material shows how important it is to have an organisational culture where it’s okay to try things out and enjoy the process. Especially in these times of change, it is important to understand how we can grasp the world around us and imagine what we could be.”

The team – which includes designers, historians and scholars – will continue sifting through this archive, adding to the digital portal to build an even richer study into the devices that defined an era, and the people who bought them. As researcher Kaisu Savola says: “Technology doesn’t just shape us; we shape technology… When we started the project, the focus was on objects. As we began going through the material, we soon realised that it was about people.”