Nokia's Global Design Sense

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• September 10, 2007 Issue of BusinessWeek

Nokia seeks design input from consumers in Bangalore and eight other developing markets.

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Were there any surprises in Nokia's emerging-markets research?

For several years our anthropologists have been studying how people in rural areas overcome some of the barriers to communication they face in their daily lives. One of the key issues was cost, which meant that mobiles were shared amongst villages or families.

What impact did this finding have on the design of the phones?

First, it challenged a basic assumption that we all have—that a mobile phone is something owned and used by one person. Building on this, we designed the Nokia 1200 and Nokia 1208, which have shared use as the top priority. They are robust enough to deal with many different people using them, while we added a shared address book so that each member of a family or village could save their own contacts and numbers separately from others. There's also a call tracker that allows people to preset a time or cost limit on each call.

And they have certain physical features to reinforce their robustness—a seamless keypad to protect them from dust, and special grip areas to make them easier to hold in hot conditions.

There is also a range of features created with the users in mind. Both of these phones have a one-touch flashlight (in case of power outages), [use] localized languages, and [have] a demo mode that allows people who have never used a mobile or have limited experience to quickly learn how to master the phone.

You just announced that a new satellite design studio will open in Bangalore. Will you collaborate with local designers?

The Bangalore design studio is located on the campus of a local design school, Shristi. We want to work with young designers, and we will employ students from the school.

We have nine such designer studios around the world. They help us to find out more about a country's culture, which we can then share with our designers globally to make our products. But our studios are not just about design—they also incorporate cultural insights, market insights, and consumer findings.

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An edited version of this article appeared in the September 10, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek.

Lakshman covers India business for BusinessWeek.