How the human experience drives design at Nokia

Nokia’s ‘culture of mobility‘ web magazine (frequently reported on on this blog) has suddenly disappeared from the company’s home page. Perhaps not surprisingly given the fact that so few people were writing about it.

From human experience to individual tastes…
In my quest to understand why, I came across a section announced as ‘How the human experience drives design at Nokia‘, but when ‘reading more’, the same picture suddenly gets another title: ‘Nokia’s newly unified design team is attuned to the tastes of the individuals‘.

…and back to human inspirations
I frankly do not think of experience research as taste research, but I guess this might be due to the copy writers. The ‘In Focus’ section covered by this title includes a nice little portrait of Marko Ahtisaari (also covered earlier here), Nokia Design’s strategy head, who follows the path of “street anthropology that explores the rich tapestry of people’s everyday lives.”

“One of the most important trends is the big human fundamental to make something your own over time. People definitely have a role to play in completing the design,” Ahtisaari says. “We see both physical adaptation, such as the way people in India use light emitting diodes to enhance religious iconography, and software adaptation, which has been made easier through straightforward scripting languages like Python.”

“Nokia is continuously working on new forms of interaction with devices,” he says. “In so doing we keep asking questions about how people are using and adapting our products so that we can find the next path forward.”