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In a twist of fate, a team of Aalto University researchers found themselves responsible for over two decades of Nokia’s best kept design secrets. It was a legacy they took seriously and the team spent years exploring it, curating it and bringing it to life in the form of the Nokia Design Archive.

Now freely accessible from aalto.fi/nokia-design-archive the archive’s digital portal holds a wealth of sketches, photographs, presentations, interviews and more, spanning the ‘golden era’ of a company that once laid claim to almost half the global market share in smartphones. 

Visualisations and expert analysis guide visitors through over 700 curated entries spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 — with an uncurated repository containing some 20,000 items and 959GB of born-digital files — the content licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes when Nokia’s handset operations were put to rest and the brand relaunched under a different parent company.

The story behind the content

It was clear the researchers were onto something globally unique with the Nokia Design Archive project. They had spent years curating donated entries, then painstakingly designed an online portal to present the visions that shaped the world. It had the potential to bring never-before-seen material to the global public to learn from, from the raw ideas behind iconic designs to the concepts that never left the drawing board. Digging through the archive was like opening up a time capsule of your own history.

But how, as Communications Services, could we help the world see its worth?

The challenge

Our vision was twofold. We wanted to bring this incredible resource to the world and get people to use it to learn. At the same time, we wanted to raise Aalto University's international profile as a community of bold thinkers where science and art meet technology and business.

The archive definitely had popular appeal. Even a small peek instantly opened the floodgates on Y2K nostalgia and a world when phones were cool. The wacky, unseen prototypes would clearly be a draw for speciality media. 

But we thought it offered so much more than this: the historical archive tells the story of a global company that transformed how we connect. And it comes at a critical moment when humankind is, once again, defining its relationship with technology. 

The approach

1. Delivering on the promise of public access: This meant working with the researchers to tweak the UI and improve the back end to help non-experts easily dive into the archive. This required more visuality, less lag and making browsing as simple as possible, while staying true to the research. Knowing what journalists would need from the interface, we helped the team to add a search function, basic mobile functionality and a tutorial that served the dual purpose of highlighting one of the interesting narratives in the archive (how Nokia used fashion designers in ideation). 

2. Hardworking content: We created content that would both contextualise and showcase the archive to the broader world –– and place Aalto University expertise at the centre of it all. Top-notch editorial photography, background articles for the curious, and, in the researchers' words, the story of how the archive came to be were pulled together on a landing page that looks bold, visually enticing and globally relevant.

3. Pitching the story to media globally: We careful put together a curated media kit, first put into action through a pre-launch to global media in mid-December 2024 with the help of our London-based PR partner. In-house, we continued to carry out critical media work to give the story its best chance leading up to the global launch on 15 January 2025. 

The results

Global media

Since the mid-January launch, we have seen major feature-length coverage in prestige media, with Aalto University expertise front and centre. And as journalists deep-dive and research drawing on the archive is published, it's easy to expect even more in coming years. 

Social media

In support of the earned media strategy, we created key social media content for @AaltoUniversity channels, in line with our day-to-day operations both at launch and for following weeks.

We gained the most traction by providing culture and fashion thoughtleader Hypebeast video material from the physical archive for its Instagram account. Since early February, the reel has earned 12.6 million views and more than 260,000 shares and 620,000+ likes. 

Visits to the archive

• The Nokia Design Archive landing page, which houses background articles and information for media and educators, has seen over 20,000 visitors since the launch (as of 27 February)

• The had 193,000 unique visitors in the first two weeks following launch –– and still counting

Sources of data: Muckrack, Meltwater, aalto.fi site analytics, Nokia Design Archive analytics