Nokia, once the global leader, is to celebrate its pop-culture status by opening a design archive.
“Everyone remembers their first Nokia,” says Mark Mason, who joined the telecoms company’s design team back in its 1990s heyday. “When you say the name, it evokes a memory.”
This is not as hyperbolic as it sounds - in 1998, the Finnish consumer electronics company was the bestselling phone brand in the world, with 40 percent of the global market.
So, it's fitting and rather deliciously nostalgic that the cultural impact of Nokia will be properly recognised for the first time on 15 January when the company’s design archive goes on display. Finland’s Aalto University has acquired the archive and will make it available through an online curated portal and by appointment.
While for Finland the impact of Nokia is indisputable - the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy reports it contributed a quarter of Finland’s economic growth between 1998 and 2007 - the brand’s international pop culture value is undeniable, too.
“Nokia was one of the first phone companies to really emphasise design and difference, with everything from very affordable phones right up to the latest cutting-edge handsets,” says Jonathan Bell, tech editor for Wallpaper* magazine. “In the world before Apple, Google and even Samsung, they stood above all the other players.”
Nokia’s factory setting ringtone - the 1902 Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega - was so ubiquitous in the 1990s and 2000s that birds learned to sing it. Yes, really. Birds in Denmark were warbling the new hi-tech songs after learning and picking up tunes from Nokia's ringtones, reported the Danish Ornithological Association.
Extraordinary as that is, it's perhaps less surprising when you learn that in 2009 it was reported that the tune was heard an estimated 1.8 billion times a day around the world - the equivalent of 20,000 times a second.
The Nokia 3210 - released in 1999, the year its operating profit was $4 billion - was key to the brand's global success as it helped to usher in a culture of complete customisation, with its colourful changeable casing at a time "when mobiles were these dull, serious, precious and expensive mini-monoliths associated with yuppies, this cheaper, curvy, happy-looking handset that looks a bit like a toy turned up,” says style journalist Murray Healy. “It’s pocket-sized, the battery lasts for ever and it seems indestructible.”
The Aalto University archive includes marketing imagery, sketches, market profiling and presentations providing new insight into what was once one of the world’s most innovative companies.