In this age of sleek minimalism and glossy screens, it’s hard to believe - but you could once chuck your mobile phone with the might of a thousand raging bears against a brick wall and it would simply fall to the ground, unscathed and still singing Gran Vals.
Beloved for their blocky designs, Nokia cell phones have become an integral part of our collective cultural nostalgia, foundational to the meteoric rise of mobile phones.
In tribute, a Nokia Design Archive featuring more than 700 entries spanning the mid-90s to 2017, will go on display 15 January 2025 via a digital portal from Finland’s Aalto University.
"We seem to be at a pivotal time again as artificial intelligence is accelerating our transitions to the future world. With all the excitement and uncertainty, the Nokia Design Archive reveals a unique “behind-the-scenes” view for us to see how the technology that’s in our lives now was shaped in the past," Lu Chen, a researcher at Aalto University, tells Euronews Culture.
Founded in 1865, Nokia was originally a paper pulp mill, forming an electronics division in 1967 and - skipping a fair bit of history here - releasing its first official mobile phone in 1987: The Mobira Cityman 900. The bulky device was nicknamed ‘Gorba’, after the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was spotted using one.
Throughout the 90s, the company established itself as one of - if not the most, dominant mobile phone manufacturer.
From their colourful snap-on covers to futuristic depictions in movies likeThe Matrix - where Neo uses the Nokia 8110 AKA ‘banana phone’ - these were products that advanced us technologically, but also embedded themselves in the cultural zeitgeist via aesthetic ubiquity.
“Nokia was in a similar position in the 90s as Samsung or Apple are today," researcher Kaisu Savola says. "These large corporations shape our lives with their products."
A plethora of early prototypes, sketches, interviews and more, the archive is a portal to nostalgia that also hopes to highlight the impact of its product designers, examining how their decisions contributed towards the evolution of an era - and could continue to resonate into the future.