Remember the pre-smartphone era, when cell phone design was fun and experimental? When phones had actual buttons?

Here's a chance to revisit some of those designs: Today Finland's Aalto University launches the Nokia Design Archive. Freely accessible to all online, it contains "sketches, photographs, presentations, interviews and more, spanning the 'golden era' of a company that once laid claim to almost half the global market share in smartphones."

"Visualisations and expert analysis guide visitors through over 700 curated entries spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 — with an uncurated repository containing some 20,000 items and 959GB of born-digital files — the content licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes when Nokia's handset operations were put to rest and the brand relaunched under a different parent company.

The project was spearheaded by lead researcher Professor Anna Valtonen, a former Nokia designer who well remembers her time at the company, some 20 years ago. "What we had at the time were phones with black and white screens that could take calls and send a text message," Valtonen says. "At the time, we were asking: Could the mobile phone be something more? What are our wildest dreams for what a phone could do?"

"In the early ages of Nokia, there was a genuine wish to understand people, how they live, what makes them tick. Now we're at a similar point of societal transformation with AI. Nobody has concretised what it is yet, but we need to get people thinking about what could be."

"The Archive reveals how designers made visions concrete so that they could be properly explored long before they became reality. It reminds us that we do have agency and we can shape our world — by revealing the work of many people who did just that."

Dive into the archive here.