Nokia’s crazy designs that never saw the light of day

In 1997, Nokia Design a phone for children in the shape of Winnie the Pooh. About 12 years later, the company dreamed of a phone that could extend over your wrist and even change its appearance. These concepts never made it into people’s hands, but are now available for your viewing pleasure in Nokia’s design archive.

Launching today, Nokia Design Archive It was developed by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The online portal hosts about 700 galleries. However, the full scope of the archive amounts to 20,000 displays, so what is currently available on the site is “just the tip of the iceberg,” says Anna Valtonen, principal researcher at the Nokia Design Archive. Valtonen previously spent 12 years at Nokia, including serving as Head of Design Research and Foresight.

Most of the exhibits date from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when electronics became smaller and smaller and the Internet made mobile computing technology possible. This new era of interpersonal communication ushered in a decade of wild experimentation at Nokia, where designers were encouraged to think about how this new technology could fit into people’s lives depending on their age group, interests and culture. “If you are a teenager living on the American East Coast, what do you want? Or if you are a grandmother in India, what is important to you?,” Valtonen says.

The archive contextualizes crowd-favorites such as “Brick“, or Neo’s ‘banana phone’ As seen in Matrixor even Nokia 5110where the game is snake Appeared for the first time. They also contain interesting concepts that have either fallen into oblivion or remained unseen until now.

Here are some highlights from the collection.