Nokia Design Archive opens two decades of design history to the public

Aalto University in Finland has opened the Nokia Design Archive, a digital portal that makes more than two decades of the phone maker's design work publicly available. The archive has been freely accessible since 15 January 2025 and covers the period from the mid-1990s to 2017, when Nokia's handset business was wound down.

What the archive contains

The portal brings together sketches, photographs, presentations, videos and interviews, including material from more than 500 designers. According to Aalto, the content was donated by Microsoft Mobile and by the designers themselves and is published for research and education. The research team is led by professor Anna Valtonen, who worked at Nokia for 12 years and helped set up the company's own design collection.

Highlights include the Nokia 5110 in five colourways, clamshell sketches drawn by Dale Frye and Jeff Deacon in 1996, Rhys Newman's 2002 studies of phones based on architectural elements, the Nokia 7600 "Mango" from 2003 and a 2014 smart-watch rendering by Apaar Tuli.

From curated entries to raw material

Visitors can browse more than 700 curated entries, each accompanied by visualisations and expert analysis. Behind them sits an uncurated repository of roughly 20,000 items and 959 gigabytes of born-digital files. The portal offers network and timeline views, keyword search and filters by topic and date.

The archive also holds undated concept work such as Morph, a flexible device designed to be worn on the wrist, along with promotional material and photographs from Nokia events.

Why it matters

Nokia once claimed almost half of the global smartphone market, and the archive documents not only finished products but also concepts that never left the drawing board. "When we started the project, the focus was on objects. As we began going through the material, we soon realised that it was about people," design historian Kaisu Savola said. The material is released under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, which allows non-commercial sharing with attribution.