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 sing 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.
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A collection of Nokia mobile phones, including previously-unseen prototypes – Aleksi Poutanen / Aalto University 2024
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.
Their Nokia 2110, released in 1994, marked the first product to feature that infamous Nokia ringtone – initially named ‘Ringtone Type 7’ and based on Francisco Tárrega’s Gran Vals. A 2009 study reported it to have been heard an estimated 1.8 billion times per day (20,000 times per second) worldwide – no wonder our eardrums remain haunted.
Most iconic was the brand’s built-like-a-brick-house 3310, so indestructible it inspired the establishment of an international sport in 2000: Mobile phone throwing.
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From their colourful snap-on covers to futuristic depictions in movies like_The 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.
“Like the [Nokia] slogan “connecting people,” I think connection was a meaningful theme for Nokia, and for this design archive. When we talk about Nokia, we naturally think about phones, but the making of these phones took inspiration from fashion, cars, gaming, anthropology and visual cultures around the world,” Chen explains.
A 3rd Generation Nokia mobile concept rendering, 1998 – Nokia Design Archive / Aalto University Archives
In 2013, the company’s mobile phone business was bought by Microsoft Mobile before being sold off in 2016 – by which time smartphones had completely seized the market.
In recent years however, many younger people have returned to using so-called dumb phones to combat excessive screen time, revealing a desire to use the seemingly obsolete objects from our past to find a sense of balance in our overly-connected world.
“Seeing the rise of non-smartphones in recent years, I feel Nokia phones often make us ponder the relationship between our everyday life and technology – how this relationship used to be and how we might want to re-design it,” Chen says.
The online display will continue to grow as Nokia’s database of 20,000 items is gradually curated, a reflection on the cultural landscape of the late 20th century and early 2000s that lets us marvel at how quickly things change.
“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,” Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the project, says.
Right now, all we’re imagining is being a very, very long snake again.
The Nokia Design Archive will be globally accessible via an online portal from 15 January 2025.
