The crazy Nokia designs that never saw the light of day

In 1997 Nokia designed a children’s phone in the shape of Winnie the Pooh. About 12 years later, the company came up with a phone that could stretch over your wrist and even change its appearance. These concepts never made it into human hands, but are now available for your viewing pleasure at the Nokia Design Archive.

Starting today, Nokia Design Archive was developed by Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The online portal contains about 700 exhibits. However, the full scope of the archive amounts to 20,000 exhibits, so what is currently available on the website is “only the tip of the iceberg,” says Anna Valtonen, lead researcher at the Nokia Design Archive. Valtonen previously spent 12 years at Nokia, including a position as head of design research and forecasting.

Most of the exhibits date from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, when electronics were getting smaller and smaller and the Internet made mobile computing technology possible. This new era of interpersonal communication ushered in a decade of wild experimentation at Nokia, where designers were encouraged to consider how this new technology could fit into people’s lives depending on their age group, interests and culture. “If you’re a teenager on the American East Coast, what do you want? Or if you’re a grandmother in India, what’s important to you?” Valtonen says.

The archive contextualizes audience favorites as “The brick,” or Neo’s “banana phone.” as seen in The matrixor even Nokia 5110where the game Snake appeared for the first time. It also includes intriguing concepts that have either fallen into oblivion or remained unseen until now.

Here are some highlights from the collection.