There they are, shiny colored polymer bars fronted by bold 4.7-inch Gorilla Glass screens. Good looking, to be sure. Ahtisaari, who heads Nokia’s design studio, picks up a canary yellow one. Others are black, gloss red and matte gray. His face is all business, but his fingertips caress the surface like a lover’s.
“Our products are human,” he says. “They’re natural. They’re never cold. That’s partly driven by color, but also partly how they feel in the hand. This looks less like a product coming off a production line in a factory — though it does—than a product that might have grown on a tree. The grandest way I could put it, is post-industrial.”
Ahtisaari eventually ticks off some other features that he hopes will draw customers to the Nokia phone. Windows 8 software, of course, with the status and activity tiles that provide information at a glance. Well-integrated mapping and location applications, including an augmented-reality layer called City Lens. Wireless charging. Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, not used for yet another payment scheme, but quick and reliable connections for activities like streaming music to a speaker.
But all of these, he says, are part of a general overall vision where advanced function is blended into unforgettable form — post-industrial form. The dream, if not the exact language, is very familiar. Nokia is marketing its phone directly into the teeth of Apple’s strength: design. (...)
His first order of business was energizing the culture of his team — it was apparently suffering from the same sort of drift as the rest of Nokia — and raising its importance in the company so that design became central to all product decision-making. While some observers thought that Nokia was left behind in the smartphone wars, and questioned Elop’s decision to cast Nokia’s fate with the unproven Microsoft Windows phone platform, Ahtisaari believed that there was still plenty of opportunity for a comeback.
“As a product area, smart phones are almost so over-covered that sometimes there’s a feeling that the core innovation in design is almost done,” he says. “Actually nothing can be further than the truth.”
The analogy he supplies is that of the auto industry. In the 1890s, he says, cars were steered by tillers, like rudders on small boats. Over the next couple of decades, ideas were exposed to the marketplace and ultimately a standard emerged, with steering wheels and gearshifts. “I think that we’re in the middle of that period,” he says.
Apple offers one path for design, he explains, with apps and folders, and Android is a variation of that, with multiple home screens. And now there’s this third option, involving live tiles that give real-time, at-a-glance information about the applications lurking beneath. “It’s another take on completely solving all the things that smartphones need to do,” he says.
Think about that auto analogy. Can he be saying that the iPhone approach will one day be as absurd as a rudder on a car? As they say in Finland, yikes.
by Steven Levy, Wired | Read more:
Photo: nomadig/Flickr
