Department of Design

Design Culture Research Projects

Research projects from the Design Culture research group

Nokia Design Archive

The Nokia Design Archive explores the role of design within Nokia in 1995-2015 to explore unseen concepts of design and opportunities of design-driven transformation and change. The project utilises a globally unique and previously unseen archive donated to Aalto University. The material consists of thousands of Nokia process models, documents, videos, and concepts.

Our research outputs will focuses on how design is used within large corporations, and on the values and processes behind the development of technology products. In the global consciousness, the history of technological development in the 20th century is dominated by the Silicon Valley myth. Researching Nokia offers an alternative history proving that even in a remote place like Finland (and the global network of Nokia design studios around the world), it is possible to create world-altering technological innovations.

In addition to learning about how design was used to generate change, the lens of design history allows us to explore Nokia as it truly was: a societal, cultural and technological phenomenon that changed everyday lives on a global scale.

The Nokia Design Archive project is funded by the Research Council of Finland.

https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi

Knitted outfit (2020) by designer Leevi Ikäheimo. Photo: Mika Kailes. Model: Paavo Kärki.

Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture

Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA) (2019–2025) is a research consortium that brings together experts from four Finnish universities, Universities of Turku and Tampere, Åbo Akademi University and Aalto University. The consortium critically examines datafication within the current digital economy, asking how it is experienced, made sense of, and resisted, and what socially sustainable solutions remain available. The consortium analyses the impact of data-driven culture for people’s different social roles and relations, as well as the vulnerabilities that it gives rise to. Second, it inquires how intimacy functions as a contested resource in data-driven creative labour, public careers, and social connections. Third, IDA explores and develops democratic ways of managing, protecting, sharing, and using personal data.

The work package situated within Aalto University, Intimacy, work and design investigates the effects of digitalization on creative work, design and understanding of intimacy and privacy, and asks how they can be protected as central assets in technology-driven occupations. We have explored, for example, fashion design as intimate work that uses designers’ embodied knowledge in ideation, conceptualization, drafting, patternmaking and material research, as well as fitting prototypes and model pieces. We have also investigated clothing as “infrastructure of intimacy” through which we communicate with others, the growing design field of smart clothing and wearable technology which is transforming design into tracking users’ bodily functions, as well as how online shopping has become a novel form of gathering data which raises concerns about the privacy of fashion consumers.

The project has curated, among other things, a major exhibition titled Intimacy for the Designmuseum in Helsinki (2021–2022) and published a book Intimacy. Embodied knowledge, creative work and digitalization in contemporary Finnish fashion (2023).

Intimacy in data-driven culture (IDA) is funded by the Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland.

https://www.dataintimacy.fi/en/