If You’re Nostalgic for Nokia, See the Devices That Defined ’90s Cellphone Design in a New Online Archive

The Finnish electronics company Nokia produced some of the most popular cellphones of the 1990s and 2000s. It became the world’s best-selling phone brand in 1998, and its rounded plastic devices became ubiquitous in Europe. While the chunky phones would evolve from cutting-edge tools to meme-ified relics in the years that followed, their design remains iconic.

“Everyone remembers their first Nokia,” Mark Mason, a member of Nokia’s design team in the ’90s, tells the Observer’s Alice Fisher. “When you say the name, it evokes a memory.”

Soon, nostalgics will be able to peruse Nokia’s visual history online. The company donated thousands of Nokia documents, videos, process models and design concepts to Finland’s Aalto University, which will be launching the Nokia Design Archive on January 15.

Inside the archive, viewers will be able to examine countless Nokia models, such as the Nokia 3310, released in 2000 and now known as the “brick” for its durability, and 2003’s Nokia 7600, or the “mango,” accompanied by designer Tej Chauhan’s sketches. Phones from the brand’s colorful 5100 series—one of which is in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History—are pictured as a late-’90s plastic rainbow, resembling modern children’s toys.

The archive also includes designs for phones that were never made, like a digital rendering of a strange green and black egg-shaped device. As Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine writes, “It’s enough to make you yearn for an era where everything looked a little less... boring.”

“Nokia was one of the first phone companies to really emphasize design and difference, with everything from very affordable phones right up to the latest cutting-edge handsets,” Jonathan Bell, tech editor at Wallpaper* magazine, tells the Observer. “In the world before Apple, Google and even Samsung, they stood above all the other players.”

Nokia may be known as a brand of the aughts, but the company’s history actually stretches back to the late 1800s, when engineer Fredrik Idestam founded several pulp mills in Finland. One of them was on the banks of the Nokianvirta river, and it inspired the name for Idestam’s new paper company. Nokia began generating electricity in 1902, and it merged with a rubber company and a cable works company in 1967.

Nokia released bulkier car and mobile phones before launching a handheld cellphone, the Mobira Cityman, in 1987. After the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was spotted using one, the roughly 1.75-pound phone was nicknamed “Gorba.” In the following decade, Nokia released model after model, including the Nokia 8110 (also known as the “banana” phone) which was featured in The Matrix in 1999.

By the late 2000s, Nokia was struggling to stay afloat in the new smartphone market (Apple launched the iPhone in 2007). Microsoft bought most of Nokia’s mobile phone business in 2013 before selling it in 2016.

NOKIA RINGTONE [1994]

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That was when former Nokia designer Anna Valtonen, a scholar of strategic design at Aalto University, acquired Nokia’s 20,000-piece database. As university spokesperson Sarah Hudson tells Artnet, a Microsoft Mobile employee who Valtonen had been in contact with called to say, “You know those archives you were interested in? I’m about to put the boxes out in the street by the dumpster.”

“This was how a treasure trove of real-life objects, including the original ‘brick’ and ‘banana’ phones and never-before-seen handmade prototypes, alongside digitally curated sketches, eye-opening market profiling, interviews, videos and presentations made its way into the hands of researchers,” Hudson says.

It took a few years to catalog the 959 gigabytes of material for the Nokia Design Archive, and many uncatalogued files remain, as Aalto researcher Michel Nader Sayun tells Artnet. Since the university acquired the material, several former Nokia designers have contributed their personal collections.

Valtonen, the archive’s lead researcher, tells Designboom’s Kat Barandy that the Nokia Design Archive is as much about the people who made Nokia products as the products themselves. She says the material exemplifies the importance of designing an organizational culture “where it’s okay to try things out and enjoy the process.”

Mason worked for Nokia for 20 years, and he says those decades were “a fantastic time for creativity,” per the Observer. He adds that the company’s designers focused on everyday people and created products that remain iconic.

“I hope people dig their old handset out [of] the drawer—they would probably still work,” Mason says. “Cut me and I’ll bleed pure blue Nokia blood.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.