On October 3rd at Remix in London, Nokia unveiled the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a mobile device for music and social media consumption with a touch-screen. The Nokia 5800 is among the first devices to support Comes With Music, the Media bar, and the home-screen Contacts Bar widget.

I had the opportunity to participate briefly in the early phases of the product development. The product program team and Nokia Design addressed together a number of physical and digital design themes, and very quickly the large 3.2″ touch-screen emerged a great opportunity. In any product, the home-screen is a prime piece of real-estate and mind share, and more often than not, it is the least useful – except to show off your dog, cat, kid, wife/husband/gf/bf, etc. and see what time it is.

The aim was to provide the best music and social media experience possible right from the home-screen by executing on our brand promises: Very human technology and Feeling close, and insights Nokia Design had gathered along the years of observing how people consume media and communicate with their most important people.

People communicate through media.
People access content through people.
The future of media is social.

Simply it was about designing a social media experience that is as human and natural as possible by making multimedia communication reflect the way people think and feel.

Photo © Nokia, 2008.

We wanted to be literal about People Connecting and offer the most explicit representation of human technology and feeling close. We designed a home-screen widget, named Contacts Bar, that shows at a glance the faces of your most important people, your recent activity with them – texts, calls, emails – as well as their latest online media activity from sites such as OVI, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

A picture is worth a thousand words… the myriad of digital photos, music tracks, and videos being shared daily is a clear demonstration that people communicate with more than words . Media allows people to vary and fine-tune the intensity, emotion, and intimacy of their communications. The Contacts Bar is about giving people additional choices on how they explore, live, work, and connect with their most important people.

The press release and additional information can be found in the press section of Nokia.com.

This is the video of my presentation for the session “Aiming for a better society” at the Lift Asia 08 on September 5th. Knock yourself out!

I would like to thank the Lift team Laurent Haug, Nicolas Nova, Sylvie Reinhard, and all the others for the invitation and the opportunity to share the Homegrown story with such an amazing audience in a breathtaking setting.

Thanks to the Nokia Design Homegrown team and extended contributors who made all this happen.

The slides are available here.

“Global issues cannot be removed from the business world, as we only have one world in which to operate.” – Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

A few weeks after unveiling remade in Barcelona, we are excited to share the context in which remade and Homegrown came into being.

Our goal with Homegrown, the umbrella project, was and still is to work towards the most sustainable, ethical, and desirable communication solutions for Nokia. We’re not interested in sentimental greenwash, but the cold hard facts. If the intangible human benefits of communicating through our devices are the rewards, it’s the physical things we produce and consume that are the costs. Why are we doing this? The numbers tell the story – it’s our responsibility, it is everyone’s responsibility. And how? Principles in action – we are simply placing sustainability at the top of our design list.

Homegrown nurtured four case-studies: Zero Waste Charger, remade, Wears in not out, and People First.

“At present, phone chargers waste 300mW of standby power when left unplugged.”

There’re roughly 3,000,000,000 phones on the planet which means there’re also 3,000,000,000 chargers. The average charger consumes 300mW on standby. You can do the math. The waste is tremendous. In addition, most mobile phones take only ~60 minutes to fully recharge these days. Yet most of us keep them plugged for hours… while resting at night.

Nokia chargers are energy-star rated and some consume less than 40 mW in standby… but this is still not zero. The design and engineering challenge is not to bring the consumption as close to zero as possible, it is to leapfrog to zero. And the only way to achieve this is to change our ways.

How can we be more energy intelligent? By contextualising and understanding energy usage of the appliances and devices we are using.

Already devices like Wattson are showing us the energy our home is using (visualised in graphs and charts) and help us figure out ways to save electricity. But eventually, appliances and devices will have to be energy smart by nature. The Zero Waste charger is a true power-down charger with a recognisable branded element – the push-button. When pressed, the push-button reassuringly starts glowing, the charger delivers a 1-hour charge cycle and then shuts off. Off as in 0mW. The push-button symbolises Nokia’s commitment to energy saving while reinforcing conscious consumption in the user’s mind.

Contrary to Bruce Mau’s Massive Change, this case study shows that Small actions x Big numbers have a Big impact.

“426,000 mobile phones are retired in the USA daily.”

In remade, recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tires are used beautifully; whilst helping reduce landfill and preserving natural resources. The concept also addresses cleaner engine technologies, and energy efficiency through power saving graphics. It is about turning waste into beauty.

Previews blog posts on this site: Nokia remade, More about remade.

“After 25 years, mobile telephony is considered an established commodity.”

How do we encourage people to keep their products longer? So much so – they might even pass it on…

Created with good design and noble materials, it becomes a phone you want to keep – one that sits comfortably alongside your most trusted possessions. With design decisions driven by sustainability first such as shrewd long term manufacturing investments, timeless design, and no colour variants – this truly is a phone that wears in not out. Inspired from Jan’s work on repair cultures, repairable and replaceable components reduce Nokia’s environmental dust-to-dust footprint and keep pace with your needs. Whether redefining a “voice classic” or supporting enduring features such as SMS, internet, and clock – these devices are grounded in mature technologies, open standards, and simple durable execution.

In this context, personal digital content portability and software designed for decades of consumption are an integral and key part of the offering. A suite of services and physical doors enable to safely manage one’s growing digital lifetime. I will return to this topic later since it deserves more than a few lines.

“50% of a phone’s energy demand is backlighting.”

How can we clearly prioritize people first? If we begin designing for those who face daily challenges with current technology, we soon find communication solutions that benefit us all.

With a focus on human universals, the “People-first” experience strips away the complexity of applications, folders, and unpredictable navigation with simpler universally understood organizing principles: time, lists and faces. Content comes first, navigation is shallow, and there are no metaphors or abstractions to confuse. New content is generated at the top of a singular vertical list settling over time into a personal history of events.

A dual layer display allows the user to balance energy efficiency with rich visuals. The user interface graphics are optimized for low-power and high-contrast B&W graphics. When an item is highlighted, a second full color display is partially activated in lieu of, or in combination with the first.

In an effort to increase local relevance, dynamic keymat graphics, based on a low-power bi-stable display, allow a greater number of language variants at little to no extra cost and on-screen actions are presented in textual and iconic form making the system accessible to a larger audience.

Out of the box, People First allows simply to connect synchronously (voice call or push-to-talk) or asynchronously (sms or email), capture a moment with the camera, schedule an appointment with the alarm clock, and manage money with the calculator. These are what we believe the mobile essentials – features that are relevant everywhere for everyone. These essentials are however sometimes insufficient. Instead of second-guessing additional features, we are encouraging personalization, hacking, and entrepreneurial ventures with widgets support, accessible native programming language (as simple as html) and freely available hardware and software specifications. Locally produced or crafted components and software provide relevance, while simultaneously reducing production efforts and the amount of atoms that need to be shipped around the globe.

Homegrown is primarily Andrew Gartrell, Rhys Newman, Duncan Burns, Pascal Wever, Raphael Grignani, Pawena Thimaporn, Tom Arbisi, and Simon James.

Additional words and pictures are available on Nokia Conversations, the press section of Nokia.com, and Julian’s blog.

During a flight to Oulu, I have traded my book for a video iPod with a music aficionado friend sitting next to me. After a dozen thumb rotations, I was still browsing artists starting with the letter E, I turned the iPod , and instantly my expectations were set – 60GB.

I wish my other devices were that clear.

Someone has noticed that overhead lockers are too high for the average John and Jane Doe as well as most of cabin crew members.

La Poste, the French postal service, is infamous for rude and unreliable service. It’s French no real surprise here, however I wonder how much is influenced by the architecture, product design and collaterals?