One of my first cellphones was a Nokia 3310. I still miss it: Launched in 2000, it was a solid worry-stone of a phone with rubbery keys that I could text my friends on during class from under the desk without breaking eye contact with my math professor. I played Snake when I felt awkward at parties and hearing the “kick” ringtone in 2025 is like hearing an ancient folk song. Playing Snake, texting, and scrolling through ringtones was pretty much all I could do with that phone, actually. It was plenty.
The iPhone was still seven years away, and for that reason, mobile phone aesthetics were still finding themselves. On Wednesday, Aalto University in Finland introduced the Nokia Design Archive, an “uncurated repository” containing 20,000 items and 959GB of files showing the designing process, imagining and ideating, and often wacky concepts for how we might use communications devices on the move in the then-future. The content—spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 according to a press release from the university—was licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes, but is now open to the public to peruse.
It’s a Y2K treasure trove of weird ideas. In one presentation deck titled “Tomahawk,” there’s a “personal remote camera + keyboard,” a “wallet” with a folding screen, a few different electronic pens, and something called a “webpad” that seems to be worn both around the wrist and neck.
A “Cricket Collection” series of concept drawings and photos show devices worn behind the ear like a pencil, tied around ankles, or clipped to belt loops or glasses.
It’s hard to tell from the archive itself how serious many of these concepts were. The archive mostly seems to document Nokia designers noodling around with non-working prototypes and playing with the aesthetics and forms of devices, rather than serious attempts at products people would use in the real world. But they had the freedom to play around with technology, something that feels largely lost in consumer electronics today.
Alongside these delightful sketches in the archive are “trend forecasting” presentations, where Nokia attempted to put into words the changing world it was working in. “Women are increasingly embracing technology as part of their social and work lives. However, it rarely succeeds to offer the desired benefits and tonalities,” a presentation from 2005 says. “A female inspired approach provides a good benchmark for innovative technologies that combine performance and style.”
There are also a lot of videos and advertising concepts, including a 1998 video called “China Dragon” where a pair of business people use an electronic pocket planner to source a surprise for a Chinese client.
The archival process for this collection happened how many archival projects do: someone had a stockpile of interesting stuff, and it would all go in the trash, unless someone else didn’t save it quickly. “Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft Mobile Phones and in 2016, Microsoft announced it was ceasing phone production entirely. That’s when my former colleague called,” Anna Valtonen, lead researcher and professor at Aalto University, said in a blog post about the project. “He was moving to Seattle – the other side of the world – the very next day, and offered me the archives… provided I could get a van there within 24 hours. If I couldn’t, the material collected over years would probably be left outside in the rain, destined for landfill.”
Valtonen had 24 hours to negotiate an agreement with Microsoft’s lawyers for ownership of the archive, she said. They secured the full rights and moved the materials to Aalto.
Nokia got out of the mobile phone game around 2013, when it sold its mobile and devices division to Microsoft. Most people probably assume it’s a dead company at this point, since it became most well-known for its bricky little phones that are now long extinct, but the company is actually still working on communications—just not on this planet. It’s currently developing what could be the first cellular network on the moon. It is also a surveillance company.
“The archive, and the research going on around its contents, challenges the idea that technologies and their formulations are hidden away in black boxes, only accessible to experts or the powerful,” Guy Julier, a professor of design at Aalto University, said in the press release. “At the moment, there is not enough creative exploration around our options—like they were doing at Nokia—or discussion that really considers people’s different needs and concerns, not just the interests of global corporations or governments.”
