By Mike on 17 July 2009
GLOBAL – Over the past month we’ve been granted rare access, fascinating insight and candid chat related to a bunch of innovative design projects taking place at Nokia’s design studio in London. It’s certainly one of the Nokia hotspots for design innovation. From gesture and homescreen ingenuity to icon creation and the craft of “making communication more human” (as told to us recently by Axel Meyer, head of Nseries design at Nokia), our recent exposure to the design studio in London has painted an engrossing picture of what happens behind the curtain and how the people at Nokia holding the crayons go about bringing new devices and experiences to life.
We’ve herded together a collection of recent videos featuring some of the passionate and creative folk at the Nokia design studio in London. Get a glimpse of how it all happens and some of the thinking behind a number of recent design projects.
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By Mike on 14 July 2009
LONDON, England – Last month we had a look behind the new Nokia homescreen, and spoke to the Nokia designers on the frontline of innovating this aspect of our devices. That story struck a chord with many of you, with heaps of great comments flooding in, so we thought we’d follow up with this new video that sees designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper explain how Nokia went about designing the new homescreen as seen on the N97 and the methods and prototypes they used in their research. Click through to watch the full video behind the new Nokia homescreen.
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By Mike on 13 July 2009
LONDON, England – Designing gestures to help you interact with your device in intuitive ways is a challenge that Nokia is grabbing with both hands and welcoming with a respectful bow. Younghee Jung is one of Nokia’s explorative designers, and she’s keenly leading the design investigation process into what makes a gesture work in real life and what it means to real people from different countries and cultures.
In this video Younghee explains more about what goes into designing gestures for Nokia devices, and conducts some live research on the streets of London, speaking to local people and equipping them with a plastic mono-block phone prop, to find out how they would use gestures for certain tasks. Click through to catch the full video and find out how folk reacted.
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By Mike on 23 June 2009
LONDON – Recently we managed to steal a few minutes with Axel Meyer, Nokia’s man at the design helm for Nseries and one of the key figures behind the creation of the newly released Nokia N97.
In the final of our series of videos from the Nokia Design day, dubbed The Inside Story, Axel talks to us about flagship products, the design process, touches on N97, and gives us his thoughts behind what goes into an Nseries device. Click through to catch our short video interview.
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By Mike on 10 June 2009
LONDON, England – Back in October 2008 we ran a story about the Music Almighty Headset Competition, which invited anyone to submit their design for a Nokia headset. Five winners were chosen in December by a panel of design and music experts and the design blueprints were then crafted into real-life working products by Nokia designers, with the plan of showcasing them in Nokia’s flagship stores. And the showcase tour has now begun, with the first stop being the Nokia flagship store in Regent Street, London, England.
Click through to see these fantastically creative headsets snapped by Nokia’s Adam Fraser, Care Specialist at the Nokia flagship store in Regent Street. Adam recently got in touch from the store floor to let us know they’d arrived (thanks for the tip!), and if you can’t get along to see them in the flesh, you’ve got to check out these must-see shots of the most unusual ear goggles you’ve ever spied.
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By Mike on 05 June 2009
LONDON, England – The recent shift towards including innovative sensors into mobile devices has given birth to a new dialect of mobile interaction and communication in the form of physical gestures – the rise of accelerometers has already facilitated the adoption of a handful of instinctive solutions to common tasks otherwise reserved to the realm of a series of button presses, whether it’s flipping your phone face-down to silence it on the Nokia 8800 or turning a device into a landscape position to rotate the image onscreen on the Nokia N86 8MP.
The field of mobile gestures is a fascinating one that Nokia is keenly exploring and researching, with explorative designers Younghee Jung and Joe Macleod on the frontline. Last week we had the opportunity to chat to them at The Inside Story design day in London about their ideas on mobile gesture design, the research they’ve been doing, and the tools that have been developed to help test how well future mobile gestures might work.
Click through to watch our video interview with the duo, in which they talk about the creation of the gesture phone prototype that they use to explore this new dialect of physical interaction designed to let you perform tasks and communicate in very new ways.
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By Mike on 27 May 2009
LONDON – We’re here at Nokia’s design event in London, The Inside Story, and user interface designers Juliana Ferreira and Lee Cooper have just given us an interesting look at what goes into designing Nokia homescreens, and highlight just how significant the homescreen is for most of us. Click through to find out what happens behind the scenes at Nokia for the designers exploring new ways to improve the homescreen interface.
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By Mike on 27 May 2009
LONDON, UK – Today we’re excited to be at Nokia’s London base for a rare behind-closed-doors design event dubbed The Inside Story.
Alastair Curtis, Head of Design at Nokia, has just introduced the themes of today’s event and the things we can expect to find out during our time here. Alastair shared a design insight that your mobile is becoming more of a “sixth sense”, equipping you with “super-human” abilities. Read on to find out more about this concept that is being explored by the Nokia design team, and what else we’ll be reporting back on.
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By Mike on 07 May 2009
GLOBAL – The story behind the making of the Nokia N97 is a fascinating one that gives a real insight of what goes into to forging a flagship device from scratch (the topic of what makes a flagship device has been sizzling on Conversations recently). So this morning we were excited to get our hands on a rare video exploring the making of the Nokia N97, and as one of the creators puts it, the “blood, sweat and tears” that have gone into bringing this new device to life.
Click to watch the full-length video on the making of the Nokia N97.
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By Charlie on 28 April 2009
ESPOO, Finland – The folks at Nokia Singapore had a little issue. They wanted to have a round table discussion with journalists to discuss the environmental activities we have at Nokia. One problem: all the people they wanted to talk to were in Espoo. It seemed silly to make a special event and have the speakers fly down. While the event would have been good, the flights, time, and money spent would not have been proper.
We do have this amazing HALO system for really good video conferencing. And we have a HALO room in Espoo and Singapore, so it made sense to invite the journalists in Singapore to connect to the people in Espoo via HALO.* We sat in on the round table discussion and took some video of what it was like (see below). Also, there were some great things said and some choice presentations. But we’ll hold off on those because we’re possibly having another round table in the near future.
So, read on to see what it was like and to see some video of the round table event.
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GLOBAL – Over the past month we’ve been granted rare access, fascinating insight and candid chat related to a bunch of innovative design projects taking place at Nokia’s design studio in London. It’s certainly one of the Nokia hotspots for design innovation. From gesture and homescreen ingenuity to icon creation and the craft of “making communication more human” (as told to us recently by Axel Meyer, head of Nseries design at Nokia), our recent exposure to the design studio in London has painted an engrossing picture of what happens behind the curtain and how the people at Nokia holding the crayons go about bringing new devices and experiences to life.
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