Dial hard: This archive holds futuristic Nokia designs that never made it to the factory floor

Hindustan Times

25-04-2025

How did a Finnish company manage to design a phone that was so hardy, it could fall into a stairwell, swirl about in a washing machine, spend years in a box, and still keep ticking?
The Nokia 3310 was launched in 2000 with a promise of 'fun, friendly, durable'. It remains a certain generation's best-loved device.
What went into the making of it? What else did the company dream up? There's trivia, history and prophetic glimpses of the future, in a digital archive launched this year by Anna Valtonen, the company's former head of design research and foresight, as a tribute to a workplace she loved.
Nokia phones ceased to exist, except as a brand name, in 2014. The phone-manufacturing business was acquired by Microsoft that year, and has been broken up and sold for parts since.
At the design archive, though, the once-dominant giant lives on. Here, 700 exhibits ranging from sketches and prototypes to research notes, market studies and employee interviews, tell the story of a company that, at its peak (in 2007), accounted for about 40% of the global cellphone market.
***
Valtonen spent 12 years at Nokia, starting in the late-'90s. It was then that work on the archive began.
'There weren't many designers working with the company at the time,' she says. 'We all started saving our work to track who made what, when. But it quickly became a way to map ideas that never made it out of the room — prototypes that fizzled out, concepts that were ahead of their time. It became a way for us to go back and see what we were thinking about at a certain point in history… what worked, what didn't, what could work.'
Valtonen quit the organisation in 2009, to pursue a career in teaching and academic research. Her colleagues at the time promised they'd continue updating the archive, and they did.
Then Microsoft took over. Two years later, they reached out: Would she like to take custody of the archive? They were shutting Nokia's handsets operation down.
Overnight, Valtonen had the material moved to Aalto University, where she is an adjunct professor in the department of design.
There were 20,000 artefacts by this point, and they were handed over to her in stacks of jumbled-up boxes. She and her team sorted through and curated them, to set up what is now a physical Nokia archive at the university. They then began digitising the archive, an effort that is ongoing.
'The online repository is arranged in thematic clusters, to invite curiosity,' says Lu Chen, a research assistant and Master's student in new media at Aalto. 'The aim is to show people how design drives technology and shapes behaviour.'
***
For designers and researchers, the online and offline spaces offer precious insight. For the layperson, the digital archive is a trove of delightful oddities.
There's the iconic 'banana phone' — a vivid yellow slide model. The drop-shaped 7600, its buttons arranged rather impractically around a tiny screen. Keep floating through the clusters and one encounters the taco-like N-Gage, designed for gamers; and the 'lipstick' 7280, a slim gadget with a scroll button in place of a keypad.
The idea is for people to not just see how Nokia connected people, but to look back at an era when design thrived and it wasn't just tied to the end-product, says Michel Nader Sayún, a PhD scholar at Aalto and a research assistant on the project. 'Big companies tend to keep information like this confidential, or heavily curated. But here, we have no business agenda. Through the archive, we want people to experience the dreams designers once had of what our collective future could really look like.'
Here are five of the quirkiest ideas out of the company's lab.
The Mango / Teardrop: The Nokia 7600, shaped like a drop or a mango, is known as one of Nokia's ugliest phones, laughs Nader Sayún. Launched in 2003, it was part of the company's attempts to rebrand some of its phones as fashion accessories. The attempt did not fare well. Both the Mango and the Lipstick proved unwieldy, their buttons arranged impractically around an incongruent screen.
Both were, thankfully, limited-editions. The Mango was sold, intriguingly, through fashion retailers such as Colette in Paris and Corso Como 10 in Milan. To see more of the lipstick, revisit The Pussycat Dolls' Beep video from 2005.
Medallion I and II: The company began experiments with wearable technology in the early 2000s (about six years before the Fitbit, and 10 years before the Apple Watch).
The Imagewear Series consisted of two medallions that could be worn around the wrist or neck. Each had a tiny screen that could be used to display an image like a fixed screensaver. The medallions could be synced with a mobile phone, showed the time, and housed a memory card. Sketches in the archive point to ideas for possible fitness-tracking wristbands, anklets, blindfolds too, though these never reached the prototype stage.
The Moonraker: This smartwatch actually got its own funeral.
According to the archive, Apaar Tuli, who led user-experience design on this product, worked 18 months to develop a watch that could also be synced with a phone, show notifications, count one's steps, play music, take pictures, silence calls and clock one's pulse, among other things.
Two months before the scheduled launch of the Moonraker in 2014, Microsoft took over and nixed the plan. They had their own smartwatch in the works.
'The UX design team was so disappointed… they organised a ceremonial funeral by burying a Moonraker prototype in the sand on a beach close to the Nokia headquarters,' the archive history notes.
The Microsoft Band was launched in 2014; it had limited capability and never really took off. The following year saw the launch of the Apple Watch.
Satellite: In 2002, the design team began toying with ideas for a range of family-friendly products centred on children. Perhaps the most notable of these was a locket encased in rubber moulding, with dual-speaker mode, called the Satellite. In a cartoon strip-like concept note, designers explained that it would connect with the parent's Planet device, allowing for limited-range communication and location-tracking. The Satellite was never launched.
Human Form: As early as 2011, the company was experimenting with a 'humanised phone' that would have a flexible, transparent display and allow gesture-based control. The idea never left the lab, but it would appear to have been a precursor for AI buttons such as the Humane pin, launched last year, which allowed for limited-function gesture computing. (It has since been discontinued.)
That's quite a history for a conglomerate that began as a paper company in 1865, and got its name from the river on the banks of which its founder set up his second mill: Nokianvirta.