(14) Fleshy-ness of Archives
Digging through the Nokia Design Archive and on the bodily elements of archives
When I think of archives, the first word that often crosses my mind is “fleshy”. And I don’t mean this in a weirdly meaty and epidermic sense. Archives feel fleshy because the passage of time signifying the work, as well as the effort of their assemblage, feel just as bodily as the materials they hold. And this effort —the feelings of endearment to recount and remember — along with the physical material, is what makes archives feel so real, so corporeal. To borrow some words from Lydia Millet:
“They don’t have to be living. There’s this,… force field around them. What they’ve received. And what they’ve given… Something that’s held so much. Something that’s loved. Its history… kind of emanates from it… She doesn’t just remind us of our memories. She embodies them. Those times can never be repeated.”
He couldn’t make them understand. How once-beloved objects rippled their essences into the air between people. How humble things were made precious by feeling.
— from The Atavists by Lydia Millet
I love this passage from Millet’s collection of short stories, where a father tries to explain the realness of his daughter’s stuffed bunny as she is moving out. He struggles to string words, but his emphasis on each characteristic shows he believes and loves this inanimate object wholeheartedly and similarly wants his daughter to believe in this love (Shoutout to Hammy, my son who happens to be a stuffed bear). In many ways, his daughter’s bunny is an archive of many things, including his love for his daughter. I feel that the fleshy-ness of archives is made true because of such feelings.
When I came across the Nokia Design Archive, I felt another pang of fleshy-ness. An immersive portal housing a history of Nokia’s vision, the website kept deep folds of two decades’ worth of unpublished research and concepts. Here, I saw joy, innovation, failure, confusion, adventure, passion, and love. I lamented not finding the archive earlier, thinking how insightful it would have been to include in my previous post, but I knew I had to make a separate piece about the archive. Built as a rhizomatic web, the archive holds 4 main collections with various corresponding entries: products, aesthetics, design process, and design strategy. Being the schema freak that I am, after spending many hours digging through each collection, I curated a list of entries that stopped me in my tracks or my mouse scroll.
Vision 99 Presentation (1997)
This deck showcases phone shells and covers, similar to phone cases, but more intact. Styles range from Winnie the Pooh and clowns to racecars and tire marks. Some designs are akin to my current phone case with chrome colorways and 3D projections with tactile grips. CPU being a literal concept made me laugh, but are we not currently fawning over deconstructed tech material as a futuristic-tech-core aesthetic?
Nokia 3000 Series Graphic Phone Covers (2003)
I am obsessed with this deck’s mood boards and copywriting presented like a whispered mantra of confidence. Their language feels like an old and overplayed marketing playbook, but constructs a nostalgic and playful craving for such need. They focus on imbuing beholders with specific feelings like “harmonious”, “peaceful”, and “utopic”. Like, yes, having an Urban Garden Blue printed Nokia phone will totally help me reconnect with nature.
The condensed word vomit might make the vision sound far-fetched, incoherent, and even a bit delirious. Corporations’ attempts to package products as a pipeline towards a visioned identity, lifestyle, or experience are not new to us. But in a world of solution-driven tech, I find these old attempts at deeply playful and colorful explorations to be more human and heartfelt. After all, this deck only contains designs that “dropped to the bottom of [their] souls and bounce[d] back with an energetic and joyous ‘yes.’” — I wonder when was the last time I felt this sort of assurance, confidence, and delight in my designs.
Moodboard and User Segmentation (date unknown)
This collaged moodboard, or what seems like the early 2000s version of user research, still feels relevant to this day. It seems like a stab at trying to understand and target young generations through contextual identity building. An “escaper” is rebellious, cool, and covert, whereas a “treasure hunter-experience swapper” is spontaneous, adventurous, and daring. What I love especially about these collages is that they feel like they could be in Addison Rae’s binder or Olivia Rodrigo’s music video. I, for one, believe collage vision boards for strategic decks should make a comeback.
Refraction & Illumination Presentation(2002)
Diffused ceiling light as casted rings, laser nightshows against skyscrapers, rippling light on a body of water… Here is a detailed inspiration from how light and shadow bend and fuse to create new perspectives and colors on the surface. My favorite is the use of atmospheric perspective and architectural grid as inspirations for the phone buttons and the screen. Under one of the sketches is the annotation “light as shadow”, perhaps referring to the built-in light for each button to cast a shadow-like effect underneath.
This is just a short snapshot of the entire archive. Some other collections that caught my eye:
Street Styles Series with flexible phone straps that mount on bikes
a fusion of fashion and technology through the 1920s glamour
The Quantum Dancing series, akin to Gameboy or Nintendo
Odyssey 2004 Pure Pop exploring “poptimism” and the use of color
I had genuine fun exploring this archive because it showed a glimpse of what it was like to push boundaries in design before the focus of design wasn’t streamlined, and the industry set a ceiling on what technological devices should be. I especially loved all the unpublished mockups that never saw the light of day until the release of this archive. There is something admirable and endearing about the idea of unrealized concepts that simply die as concepts — the process tried to make every practical and impractical consideration; every exploration was an attempt to leave no stone unturned.
Now we cry from joy from Nokia phones dancing to the Tchaikovsky ringtone. We turn to vintage tech for nostalgia and aesthetics. We sometimes even look to the past to move towards the future. In the early 2000s, South Korea was obsessed with “폰꾸”, short for “폰 꾸미기” or phone decorating. This wasn’t simply decorating with cute stickers or switching out cases. People were disassembling their flip phones to place neon sticky notes under their keypads to make them different colors or put multi colored optical fibers to make them light up. They pierced holes to add jewelry and gems, and even printed personal photos onto large sticker sheets to wrap the phone like car vinyl wraps. These advanced phone decorations were called “튜닝,” a Korean loanword of the English term tuning, and were widely offered at tech stores. It wasn’t unhinged to paint nail polish on phone bodies. They were never too precious to keep as is. When watching old interviews about why people chose to “tune” their phones, they reply, “It’s different from others. That way it’s more personal. It is solely mine.”
Today, it feels more difficult to have complete ownership of modern technologies. Broken parts are hard to replace and can only be repaired by experts or corporations producing the product. Often, they are designed to be disposed of after a few cycles, so consumers move on to purchase new versions, a planned obsolescence, if you will. My current phone is on a three-year lease contract, so it technically does not belong to me, but the original phone that was under the contract (iPhone 13 Pro) was mugged on the 33. Having lost my phone once, if I learned anything from that experience, it’s that these phones are not that precious or personal to me as objects, but more so the archives they contain.
I saw a post that questioned if we could still love things we do not own. It mentioned that “love requires friction” — a continued effort towards growth and lived memories. I was absolutely devastated to lose 6 months of my unsaved photos and asked my friends if they had any pictures of shared memories from that time frame. Archives might be an attempt at reaching an exhaustive process, collection, or even an answer in whatever one seeks, at least as close to exhaustive as one can get. My urge to always take photos of my time spent with my loved ones may be an attempt to fully capture my love, but to realize it’s never enough. So I do it relentlessly, to keep an ever-growing photomontage. And with greater attempts, fleshier these archives seem to become.
With much fleshy gooeyness,
— Eileen