Nokia Design Archive by Aalto University

The Nokia Design Archive is a publicly accessible, online digital portal, created as a research project in the Department of Design at Aalto University, Finland. With items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and former Nokia designers, the research group curated a unique and previously unseen collection to study the history of design and technological development. The collection spans the mid-90s, through Nokia’s heyday, until 2017 when the brand’s handset operations ended.

The uncrated archive holds over 20,000 entries and over 950GB of digital files: the interactive web application we are submitting for this competition was designed to illustrate the connections between 722 curated archival entries and the working experiences of 202 designers. The information is organised strategically to spark the exploration of archival entries with a relational approach. Instead of displaying an index of entries, a network visualization allows visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the complex body of work of Nokia designers: recurring topics, influences, different expertise, parts of the design process, etc. Each entry exhibited in this application is connected directly to the Aalto Repository, which will be integrated with the National Archives of Finland later. In addition, there is a timeline chart displaying former Nokia designers’ working stories and their memories with certain archival items.

The creators of this site are Lu Chen (Master's student), Michel Nader Sayún (Doctoral Researcher) and Kaisu Savola (Postdoctoral researcher). In 2023, the decision was made to create an interactive platform to make the archive more accessible. Nader was tasked with conceptualising the platform and Lu Chen joined as a designer and developer. From October to December 2023, they prototyped and tested four interactive visualisations with content curated by Savola and organised by Nader. Lu Chen continued to create the revised interface design and programmed two interactive visualisations and the portal from June to August 2024. Improvements to the portal back-end infrastructure and user experience were deployed from November 2024 until January 2025, readying the Archive for a successful global launch on January 15th.

Even though the archive is extensive, and much information has been gathered by the team of researchers, the potential for more research, learnings, and additions is enormous. For that reason, some entries are labelled "unknown" or do not have a complete description yet. In the words of the Principal Researcher of the Nokia Design Archive, "When it says 'unknown' somewhere, it just means we haven't come that far yet. That's also the beauty of this project - that we are not sharing it as a commercial site, it is not a service, it is not polished or finished. We are really opening up the first starting points of a larger research effort." (2024)

With donations from more designers and more research being done every day, the Nokia Design Archive is constantly growing. Through this experimental project, we envisioned how an archive could become a living, growing, dynamic space for knowledge creation with a wider community. For us, the image of “a dusty and isolated storage room” should be renewed – in the post-digital condition, the network allows us to fabricate “rhizomatic” connections between archives and other memory institutions. This connectivity reveals new possibilities for using archival research in cultural and educational processes. We wish to inspire similarly creative archival practices and digital cultural heritage around the world, making qualitative data accessible, visually exciting and appealing to a wider audience. At the time of submission, that archive has attracted widespread and positive international media attention, and over 170k unique visits in the space of two weeks, with numbers steadily growing.