New archive opening 15 January with the work of Nokia Design

16 januari 2025

Nostalgia dive and interesting look into how technology evolves — Nokia Design Archive is now launched.


The Nokia Design Archive is both an archive and a research project that investigates the role of design within Nokia from 1990 to 2015. The project centres around a unique set of archival materials related to design work conducted at Nokia. The initial materials, donated to Aalto University, consist of thousands of sketches, objects, documents, publications and videos in both physical and digital formats. Today, there is a total of over 20 000 archive entries in the Nokia Design Archive, and a digital portal with over 700 curated entries that makes it easy to access.

The Nokia Design Archive's digital portal is freely accessible to all for research and education purposes beginning 15 January 2025 and you can access it here: Nokia Design Archive

The ensuing nostalgia dive provides not only an ode to the classic Nokia devices (and their very 90s styling), but also an interesting look into how technology evolves. "In the early ages of Nokia, there was a genuine wish to understand people, how they live, what makes them tick. Now we're at a similar point of societal transformation with AI. Nobody has concretised what it is yet, but we need to get people thinking about what could be," said lead researcher Professor Anna Valtonen in a release. "The Archive reveals how designers made visions concrete so that they could be properly explored long before they became reality. It reminds us that we do have agency and we can shape our world — by revealing the work of many people who did just that."

The research project started in 2020 and has been led by Anna Valtonen, today Vice-Chancellor at Konstfack, with a research team consisting of designers, design historians, organisation and management scholars and funded by the Finnish Research Council, the Kaute Foundation and the Finnish Society of Crafts and Design Centennial Foundation.