Homegrown – Nokia’s new design thinking on sustainability

Nokia’s advanced design team today shared “Homegrown”, a long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices. The team is exploring specific environmental and social issues including recycling, energy and how to make the benefits of mobile technology available to more people.

The project is being run by the same team who created Remade – a concept first shown at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year and that explores how recycled materials may be used in the future to make mobile devices. At today’s event in Nokia’s London design studio the team showed for the first time some of the other concept they are working on. These are:

• Zero Waste Charger concept – this explores ways to reduce the energy that is wasted when chargers are unplugged from a mobile device but left plugged into a live mains socket.
   
• People First concept – this concept takes three human universals of the way people think about communication – time, lists, and people – to inspire and examine new user interface ideas.
   
• Wears in, not out concept – as more services become available on our mobile devices this concept explores how people could potentially upgrade their devices digitally rather than physically in the future, giving people an additional choice on how they use and update their mobile phones.

The design team developing these concepts works on a time frame of looking three to five years out into the future. By sharing some of these ideas and stimulating a discussion they hope to develop innovative new ideas that can be used both within Nokia’s own business but also more broadly to drive environmental improvements.

– Photos of the concepts
– A beautiful presentation by Rhys Newman (pdf)
– Further background by team members Julian Bleecker and Raphael Grignani and on Nokia Conversations