Nokia and Design

Posted by: Kerry Capell on April 30

Just returned from an interesting day-long tour and seminar on Apr. 29 at Nokia’s new design studio in London’s Soho district. Nokia’s head of design Alistair Curtis spoke about how the company’s design efforts begin and end with people. He also noted that the biggest challenge facing the company’s 300-plus global design team is the “reality of the digital world.”

In the not so distant past, the end game of design for Nokia was the phone, Curtis says. Now the phone is a springboard to all sorts of services, he says. Developing relevant services, he believes, means creating an open platform. Then consumers can eventually bolt on applications as needed.

By far the most interesting discussion of the day was led by Nokia’s human behavioral researcher Jan Chipchase and Younghee Jung, who will head up a new services and user interface design group in London. They spoke of the Future Urban project Nokia conducted over the last year looking at the mega-trend of urbanization. According to the United Nations, this year for the first time more people in the world will live in urban areas than rural. Nokia went to three cities, Rio de Janeiro, Accra, and Mumbai to get a better sense of what new services and new applications might emerge 15 years out based on this growing trend of urbanization.

One research method used was what Nokia calls “open studio.” Working with local experts such as NGOs or even students, Nokia designers went into each city and set up a community based competition asking people to design their dream phone. The results were unusual and led to some interesting insights such as a star shaped phone designed by someone in Ghana that could house up to four different SIM cards, reflecting the local preference for using more than one operator in order to get better prices and coverage. For a look at 15 of the designs, check out this slide show that we put up today.

Chipchase and Jung have traveled all over the world for Nokia as design anthropologists and their inisghts can be found on their personal blogs at http://younghee.com and www.janchipchase.com