“Everyone remembers their first Nokia,” says Mark Mason, who joined the telecommunications company’s design team at its peak in the 1990s. “When you say the name, it evokes a memory.”
This isn’t as hyperbolic as it sounds: in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the world’s best-selling phone brand, with 40% of the global market and 70% of the UK market.
Nokia’s cultural impact will be properly recognized for the first time in January, when the company’s design archive goes on display. Finland’s Aalto University acquired the archive and will make it available through a curated online portal, as well as displaying it on its Espoo campus.
While for Finland the impact of Nokia is indisputable: the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (Etla) reports that it contributed a quarter of Finland’s economic growth between 1998 and 2007 – The value of the brand in international pop culture is also undeniable.
“Nokia was one of the first phone companies to really emphasize design and difference, with everything from very affordable phones to the latest cutting-edge phones,” says Jonathan Bell, technology editor at Wallpaper* magazine. “In the world before Apple, Google and even Samsung, they were ahead of all the other players.”
Nokia’s factory ringtone (Francisco Tárrega’s Gran Vals 1902) was so ubiquitous in the 1990s and 2000s that the birds learned to sing it. In 2009, the tune was reported to be played approximately 1.8 billion times a day worldwide, the equivalent of 20,000 times per second.
The Nokia 8110 phone, better known as the banana, had a starring role in the 1999 film. The matrix. The brand quickly became imbued with cultural prestige.
The style journalist Murray Healy worked in the face magazine in the ’90s during Nokia’s heyday and is now editorial director of the fashion publisher Perfect. “In the late ’90s, when cell phones were those boring, staid, precious, expensive mini-monoliths associated with yuppies, along came this cheaper, curvier, happy-looking phone that looks a bit like a toy,” he says. “It’s pocket-sized, the battery lasts forever and it seems indestructible.”
Healy says the Nokia 3210, launched in 1999, was key as it helped start a culture of complete customization, with its colorful interchangeable casing. “You could even print the name of your favorite band.”
Nokia was also the first mobile phone manufacturer to support SMS text messaging, and the phones’ keyboards were perfectly designed for it.
“All of these factors gave it immediate appeal to the youth market, which was already adept at getting around the prohibitive cost of phone calls by texting,” says Healy.
Mason, who worked at Nokia for 20 years and is now a design expert for the UK Design Council, says it was a fantastic time for creativity. “We created a design language from the beginning that put people at the center. Our mantra was ‘human technology’ and Nokia’s motto was ‘Connecting people’. Everything we did was around that. Even the keyboard was curved like a Mona Lisa smile. When you looked at him, he smiled at you.”
The Aalto University archive includes marketing images, sketches, market profiles and presentations that provide new insight into what was once one of the world’s most innovative companies.
Anna Valtonen is a senior researcher at Nokia’s design archive and a former designer at the company. His favorite artifact on the records are the audio tapes of designers describing what they’ve been working on. “In combination with the visual materials, it creates a more human story. “Not only does it color the documents, but it also describes what the designers were trying to achieve.”
Nokia’s operating profit was $4 billion in 1999, but the journey was not to last.
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Ben Wood, chief analyst and chief marketing officer at CCS Insights, says: “It’s a sad story of a great company that not only defined but dominated an industry for more than a decade, only to disappear into oblivion faster than we thought. no one could have imagined. “
Nokia’s fall was due to a combination of factors. Complacency played a role: The company did not accept new approaches, particularly the competitive threat posed by more powerful touchscreen smartphones, such as the iPhone.
As of 2007, Nokia’s market value decreased by approximately 90% and it was purchased by Microsoft in 2013.
The Nokia design archive is a window into an optimistic era when personal devices and technology were seen as purely positive additions to life and family well-being. But its clunky, chunky phones are now finding a new audience among young people whose parents grew up with the brand and now want to give their children less access to social media.
Nokia phones have been back in production since 2016, manufactured by Human Mobile Devices (HMD), an independent Finnish mobile phone manufacturer, whose staff is largely made up of former Nokia employees.
Valtonen said working on the archive gave him more than a sense of nostalgia. “It made me feel more optimistic (and forward-looking) than anything else. There are so many changes happening in technology at such a rapid pace that it’s great to stop for a moment and take a look at all the work going on behind the scenes. “I hope the material inspires people and pushes them to see the possibility of innovation.”
Mason’s hope is more blatantly nostalgic. “I can’t be excited enough about my time at Nokia. It was like a family and we created design icons. I hope people take their old phone out of the drawer; it will probably still work. Cut me and I bleed pure Nokia blue blood.”