You Can Now See Every Weird Nokia Product And Concept In This New Digital Archive

Ryan McLeod / Android Authority

If you’ve ever been curious as to why a company made certain decisions, you’d usually have a hard time learning the answer. Most companies, especially smartphone makers, prefer to keep the inner workings of their business under wraps, regardless of how interesting or mundane the knowledge may be. With that said, we’re now getting a rare view into the inner workings of Nokia through a newly launched digital archive.

Today, Finland-based Aalto University announced it is launching the Nokia Design Archive. Essentially a virtual museum of everything Nokia from the mid-90s to 2017, the archive contains sketches, photographs, presentations, interviews, and more.

The archive’s digital portal is freely accessible to anyone who’s interested in the history of Nokia. Getting to look at the various products and concepts over two decades is interesting enough, but that’s only one reason to check out this archive. Arguably, the most fascinating thing here is that it shows how ideas and decisions influenced Nokia’s products and how everything is connected.

“Every large global company is trying to understand what drives people, how we see the world around us — but you don’t want to let anyone else in on this thinking. It’s so important, but it just doesn’t leak,” says lead researcher Professor Anna Valtonen. “The archive is one of the first opportunities we have to see the work that every organization does behind-the-scenes.”

Along with Valtonen, a team of designers, design historians, and organization and management scholars are behind the creation of the archive. These researchers are also hoping to develop and add more content over time.

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