Peek behind the curtain of Nokia’s design studio in London

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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Nokia gesture design video (and live research in London)

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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Mobile gesture design at Nokia – developing a new dialect of interaction

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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What can we learn from the Korean code of Internet ethics as parents and users?

Korea, ASIA – Having earlier posted a piece on Nokia’s Jan Chipchase and his contribution to this week’s “Beyond the Web Browser” themed Lift Asia conference in Korea, it reminded me of an interesting article I came across last month regarding Korean Internet etiquette education, written by no other than Jan’s old partner in design, Younghee Jung.

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Breaking the mould of mobile behaviour

INTERNATIONAL – As a member of the Nokia Design Studio research team, Younghee Jung is on the vanguard of behavioural science and if you pop along to her blog you’ll discover all manner of ruminations and insights into how we interact with our mobile devices.