GOOD DESIGN Interview - Nokia Design Team

This interview appears as part of the GOOD DESIGN awards book. The awards were created in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames and Edgar Kaufmann, Jr..  The interview expands on the themes of the video above and the culture of the Nokia Design team.    In your role as Head of Design at Nokia responsible for Nokia product design, is there any particular direction you will be taking the company from a design point-of-view? In the studio, we talk about making products that are pure, built better, human and advanced. We aim for a harmony between the physical and the digital.  Nokia was the world’s number one telecommunications company. Do you intend to regain that market prominence and any plans or strategies you can disclose to do so? Yes. Ultimately it's for people to judge the quality of our work and products. One area we are working on is helping you to personalize your phone experience, so that you can easily do those things you do everyday, surfacing the people, places and actions that are most relevant to you. What is the future of the hand-held telephone device? Will it exist in the next decade? Heads up! If you look around you today in any city around the world, you'll see people, perhaps a couple in a restaurant, with their heads down, staring in their smartphones "romantically" pinching and zooming. Our goal is to design communication products that give people their head up again. This means products that are glanceable, that don't require any more attention than necessary. A simple example is the glanceable clock and notifications on the screens of our new phones, removing the need to "turn on" the device.  Is the future of telecommunications more abstract than the actual tools that accomplish their results, meaning, is the future the kind of route some firms like IBM have taken and ventured into services rather than the design or manufacturing of objects?  Will design, in the end, become invisible? I like Naoto Fukasawa's idea of design dissolving in behavior, but I don't think this means design is becoming invisible. Software and services make up more and more of the value in technology products, but at the same time the mechanical interfaces of objects are becoming more and more important. In an increasingly digital world, people are responding to the tactile qualities of our products.  What about the other technologies for transportation, habitat, electronics…How do you see those in the not so far-away distant future? Already today the data from mobile devices is being used to improve life in cities, to make transportation more efficient and ecological. We are building a constantly updated digital model of the real world with our HERE maps that makes this possible.   After the economic booms in the past decades, the dot.coms, stocks and shares, the housing bubbles, in your opinion, what’s next? As a famous entrepreneur once said, software will eat the world. The Internet will work it's way through education, healthcare, travel and other sectors of the economy, just as it continues to work it's way through media and telecoms. The Internet is an inherently democratizing technology.  The telecommunications industry has experienced more changes in the last decade than in its entire history. In discussing the future of telecommunications one needs to ask first: is there a future?  Or is it just the same past and present repeating themselves? The human need to connect will persist, and it will express itself in new ways.  In your capacity as head of design at Nokia are there any positives or negatives of the firm’s past you intend to carry forward? We believe that technology should make us more human. And that technology can still connect people. Both of these are positives that should be carried forward. In terms of the role of the designer, have designers become detached from the consumer as the targeted audience? I don't think so, at least not the designers I respect and work with.  There are ever more ways to get information and feedback from people over the Internet and for example,  photography and video. This includes getting close to real-time feedback on prototypes during the design process which is very inspiring for us in the studio.  Do you feel that most design has become too egotistical…the role of the designer handing down “Manna from the Heavens?” The media often emphasizes individual egos and creators over people's everyday experience. The only breakthroughs in design are created through deep collaboration. We  think of the studio and engineering teams as one system. Increasingly we think of what we do as architecture.  From your previous work at the media company Satama Interactive and Blyk, both of which were trailblazers in the Digital Age, did you take anything away with you that is applicable today and to your present and future work at Nokia? I continue to be fascinated by how ideas and products spread online.   As the founding investor and former CEO of the online business travel startup, Dopplr, what is your future vision of the Social Atlas and how will you apply this in your new thinking in the future? People will increasingly create their own maps of the world and share these. There will be millions of maps.  We are building the platform for this with our HERE maps. When you were at Blyk, the free mobile service, launched in 2007, the company offered a "free" ad-supported mobile phone network that offered text messages and customer-to-customer calls seems very democratic.  Do you believe design and technology should be free, ultimately democratic; and if so, how? I believe that innovation is as much about business models as it is about the product. Making things free is one way to innovate. Because design focuses on the human point of view, it is  inherently democratic. It is, to quote Aalto, about creating a gentler structure to life. But I don't believe design should necessarily be free.  You contributed to the book, Freesouls: Captured and Released by Joi Ito and contributed the essay, “Intelligent Travel” As I understand, the project began in 2007 as way for Ito to freely distribute, through a Creative Commons Attribution License, quality photos of the free culture community without the hindrance of copyright or permission.  You seem to be a bit like a renegade, bucking the system, disrupting the status quo.  Are you an enfant terrible?  What are the fundamentals ideas that shape your beliefs? I believe in asking good, curious questions. If that makes me an enfant terrible so be it! It's great that someone can make creative works available for sharing online under Creative Commons licenses if he or she so chooses. I grew up on the early Internet, and these ideas of sharing economies have greatly shaped my beliefs.  At one point, the market will become totally oversaturated if it hasn’t already.  The world is flooded with Samsung and Apple computers and iphones and ipads.  How much of this can the world sustain? Is it sustainable?  What next? We are very serious about the sustainability of our product making, packaging and end-to-end business systems. There are still many people in the world who don't have access to mobile phones. Giving people affordable means to communicate is a worthwhile goal.  Is the future of augmented reality already here? Where are the other technologies: touch-base or gesture based recognition; speech recognition leading us?  How will these transform everything including telecommunications? I've recently been drawn to the work of artists playing with space, motion and perception, like Olafur Eliasson and Bill Viola. In different ways in their work they create a machine into which you enter and complete the work by interacting with it. I think designers of technology products can learn alot from their work.  Finland and Nokia are some how intrinsically interlinked.  Maybe because the success of Nokia and Finland has something to do with the Finns’ sense of ingenuity, the ability to overcome isolation, or a strong ethical approach to excel.  Is there anything inherently “Finnish” to your methodology in design or to your way of design thinking? Nokia as a brand and company is very much a product of Finland, while clearly global. I think a kind of quiet empathy and integrity runs deep in the Nokia culture, and this is a strong foundation on which to build.  Some people believe design is in the Finnish DNA.  Would you agree with that and what do you think is the future for Design in Finland? Yes, I believe that there is a focus on the beauty of the everyday. My hope for the future is that we see more of those qualities in objects that combine the physical and the digital.  I read you are a musician. What instrument do you play?  What did you receive a Grammy Showcase Award for?  Is music part of or inherent in your thinking process? Music, creativity and thinking are inseparable for me. They're what it means to be alive. I play the electric bass. We won the Grammy Showcase Award for new artists many years ago with a band called Skizm. Members of the band have gone on to play with David Byrne, Lenny Kravitz, Atoms for Peace among others. It's great to see old friends doing well.  Eero Saarinen, the founder of GOOD DESIGN, said:  “The purpose of architecture is to shelter and enhance man's life on earth and to fulfill his belief in the nobility of his existence.”  What is the task of today’s designer to achieve that same noble end? To connect people, to bring us closer.

ENDS

Comments

[Anon]

hello Marko plz plz plz revamp nokia 3110c with a 2.0 screen, and 3G with 3mpx camera lumia body and same keypad as 3110....Id love that thankyou was the best phone. I believe this will be great seller with specs. People like compact with good S40 specs.

[Anon]

I forgot I tried the Nokia 301 but DPAD button was very small. My ideal phone is like i said 3110c but with 2.2/2.0 screen, 3G/3MPX camera, lighting effect for silent users messaging. with a lumia body, 3110c is a very nice phone to hold compact, solid not to thin or big. Just it is old looking now :( however i still use it, as for some reason very easy to text on, as i love S40, and candy bar.