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Nokia Acknowledging Fanboy Concept Work

By Rain Noe - April 8, 2011

in Object Culture

For ages, fanboys have pumped out concept renderings of different products and stamped a well-known corporate name on them to lend an air of legitimacy. The worst of these have been pure flights of fancy with no attention paid to "design DNA"—some of the more ridiculous faux-Apple-branded concepts come to mind—while the best have incorporated well-recognized design elements, using a certain angle here, the proper font there, to suspend disbelief.

Good or bad, these concepts have largely been ignored by the companies themselves. But now we're seeing something interesting, an actual Nokia-branded blog displaying the concepts prominently. It's only after carefully reading the descriptions (or recognizing images from earlier Engadget/Gizmodo posts) that readers discover the concepts were not done in-house, but were in fact culled from around the internet.

So what does this mean? Is this a move of desperation by market-share-losing Nokia? (You can't, and won't, see Apple doing this, for instance.) Another step towards crowdsourced design? A shrewd form of talent-spotting with an eye towards recruitment? At the very least, it will hopefully mean that talented young designers who previously had no shot at capturing these companies' attention are now able to do just that. Whether their bold, non-boardroom-inspired design strokes will trickle up into the actual product remains to be seen.

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Paul

13 years ago

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i believe remade and eco-sensor were done by nokia design researchers. the ones where a designer's name is listed are presumably third-party designs. but nokia design organizes and sponsors concept design competitions at places like central st. martins so it is not surprising that there are a lot of such student project renders floating around (i.e., with explicit nokia branding) and that nokia knows about them.
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liaqat

13 years ago

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great designs but will be a FAIL for sure
nokia has lost its plot now
Android for the win ;)
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