In the final of our series of videos from the Nokia Design day, dubbed The Inside Story, Axel talks to us about flagship products, the design process, touches on N97, and gives us his thoughts behind what goes into an Nseries device. Click through to catch our short video interview.

Off camera, Axel talked more about mobile design, highlighting as humans our “uncomplicated desire to connect” and the constant ambition at Nokia design of “making communication more human.”

He also threw some interesting stats in our general direction, regarding photo sharing. I was surprised to hear that there are over 20 million pictures uploaded in Flickr from Nseries devices. A mind boggling 2.4 billion friends are tagged in Facebook. Over nine hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Scribble down your thoughts in the comments section below.

Click through to see these fantastically creative headsets snapped by Nokia’s Adam Fraser, Care Specialist at the Nokia flagship store in Regent Street. Adam recently got in touch from the store floor to let us know they’d arrived (thanks for the tip!), and if you can’t get along to see them in the flesh, you’ve got to check out these must-see shots of the most unusual ear goggles you’ve ever spied.

Earning a dedicated area at the Regent Street flagship store, the winning headsets are sat proudly on plinths and encased in perspex. Take a closer look here >>

The headsets will be doing a tour of all the Nokia flagship stores over the coming months, so stay tuned for more updates on when they’re coming to a city nearest you.

We think they’re awesome. My personal favourite is the one with white angel wings and gold organ pipes and horns. The graveyard and wolfman one comes a very close second. What’s you’re favourite? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Photos from Adam Fraser

The field of mobile gestures is a fascinating one that Nokia is keenly exploring and researching, with explorative designers Younghee Jung and Joe Macleod on the frontline. Last week we had the opportunity to chat to them at The Inside Story design day in London about their ideas on mobile gesture design, the research they’ve been doing, and the tools that have been developed to help test how well future mobile gestures might work.

Click through to watch our video interview with the duo, in which they talk about the creation of the gesture phone prototype that they use to explore this new dialect of physical interaction designed to let you perform tasks and communicate in very new ways.

With gestures it’s easy to label it as a gimmick or a trend, but the reality is these aren’t cold-blooded replacements cannibalizing traditional interfaces, but rather natural and optional alternatives. For example, just because two people working in London might naturally default to using Bluetooth to share a photo, in rural Ghana the gesture of an intricate handshake and pressing two phones together to transfer content (a la Near Field Communication) might be the more suitable option here, and hence the gesture in this scenario suits the task in a place where Bluetooth mightn’t be front of mind or even seen as an option.

This is a concept that Younghee and Joe have a great deal of first-hand experience in researching. As part of their fieldwork they ask people from many countries and a broad spectrum of cultures to play out scenarios of how they might perform a task with a gesture that feels natural to them, using simple plastic mono block phones as props.

They set out a series of tasks for people, such as silencing a ringing phone. Sure, the flip-to-silence gesture is already alive in a number of devices, such as the Nokia 8800 and N97, but it was great to hear examples of some of the physical gestures people suggested in their research. A few of my favourites that Younghee and Joe mentioned were people wanting to squeeze the phone to shut it up, while others put their index finger over their mouth to shush it or simply covered the phone with their hand. The strangest, but my pick of the bunch was simply staring at your phone with a rather annoyed look, as if it were a naughty child that needs to be quiet.

One of the most interesting points discovered during the design process is that there must be a metaphorical or physical relationship between a gesture and a task. A form or emotional and rational alignment that is enjoyable and socially appropriate, as Younghee and Joe explain it. So, for example, if you’re giving something to someone, the concept of gravity comes into play, as typically in the physical world you drop an object into someone’s palm in the exchange process, so this movement, and the fact that gravity dictates that the giving hand is above the receiving one, could be applied in similar mobile data transfer scenarios. It’s not that this is the answer, but rather this is the sort of thinking that helps guide Nokia’s designers towards solutions.

Once a collection of potential gestures are agreed upon, they’re then taken out into the real world and played out using a smart gesture phone prototype (see video to hear Younghee and Joe talk about it’s creation).

It’s certainly an area of design that I’m keen to witness develop and evolve. And of course there are a bunch of interesting questions and debates that gestural interaction raises. Such as personalised gestures. Could we (or should we) be given the option in the future to create and evolve a custom set of mobile gestures to suit our personal behavioral habits, or should we work towards a shared and recognized lexicon of worldwide gestures as it were? What do you think?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below. But while you mull that over, watch our video with Nokia designers Younghee Jungand Joe Macleod below.

Early on Juliana hit us with a monster statistic - of the total time you spend using your mobile phone, on average 85 per cent of that time is spent on your homescreen. Does that surprise you? I must say I never imagined it would be that much. Regardless, the fact remains that we spend a huge amount of time engaged with our homescreens. So the upcoming N97 is the first device to fully realize the research that has taken place over the past two years by Juliana, Lee and the other UI design specialists at Nokia, when it comes to creating a new breed of homescreen experience - an experience that reflects the now embedded trend of personalization and our desire to communicate, share media and control any extension of ourselves on our terms. Not just digitally either, with the likes of Nike iD (which lets you custom create your own trainers to your taste) quoted as an example. As Juliana explains:

“The homescreen appropriate way to personalize plethora of content that is meaningful to you. It allows people to make their products their own. We are building tools to enable people to make the products for themselves”

In terms of how the design team has approached investigating and developing Nokia’s new homescreens, including that of the N97, Juliana explains it’s a three-step process.

Firstly, the team keenly observed and gathered data on how people think about personalization in a number of counties including the UK, USA, China, Philippines, Brazil and India. These initial findings gave the design team insight into the global similarities and differences between people when it comes to personalization, culturally and beyond, spread around the globe. For instance, one granular finding was that a worker interviewed in the UK and a rural worker in Nigeria shared the same interest of wanting to get the football scores for the Premiere League delivered to them - different lives and cultures, but some fundamental shared needs. The job of the design team is to address these sorts of micro needs in a flexible and effortless way, with the overarching solution being widgets and wallpapers, and enabling people to fully customize them.

So the second step in the process of designing the new homescreen was the exploration of concepts and prototypes. The team asked hundreds of people to create their ideal homescreen with paper prototypes, and found that no two homescreens were the same and that people want complete freedom to place stuff wherever they wanted. Personalization in practice saw people feedback with some interesting requirements, such as one guy who simply said “I really don’t want to hide by daughter’s face with email”. Fair point.

Plus, people called for widgets that would morph in size to make them more contextually relevant and significant when appropriate (something that isn’t in the current homescreen, but is being looked at). For example one person in the study was a Manchester United fan who said, “for that 90 minutes the football is on, I want to see the Man. Utd. widget as clearly as I can. It should be big while the game is on and smaller when it’s not”

Corralling all this information and feedback led to the final stage of validation and testing of the homescreen to make it seamless and effortless. Which is the stage we find ourselves at with the N97.

As for what’s next? The design team is looking at ways to enable this tool for more Nokia devices. Also the ambition is to enable multiple homescreens on single device.

What do you think to what you’ve seen of the N97 homescreen? Is personalisation an essential element for your mobile life? Share your thoughts below.

Alastair Curtis, Head of Design at Nokia, has just introduced the themes of today’s event and the things we can expect to find out during our time here. Alastair shared a design insight that your mobile is becoming more of a “sixth sense”, equipping you with “super-human” abilities. Read on to find out more about this concept that is being explored by the Nokia design team, and what else we’ll be reporting back on.

Now this notion of your mobile providing your with pseudo super-human abilities might sound a little exaggerated, but the evolution of context aware services is arguably a powerful sixth sense that, as Alastair’s design colleague Bill Sermon mentioned, equips you with a new sort of “peripheral vision” that enables you to see things you perhaps weren’t expecting. And as Alastair explains this “frees you from the complexity of technology to let you look up and enjoy the world around you”. This new breed of mobile behaviour is being investigated and developed with the design ambition being to create interfaces that are absolutely instinctive and don’t keep trapped looking at a screen - instead of say how you might find yourself immersed in a desktop computer screen, the Nokia design team is looking at ways to make your mobile phone screen a glance-at tool to inspire you to spend your time immersed in your physical world, aided with digitized help from your handset.

The concept of your mobile device equipping you with a sixth sense is certainly an interesting one. And new methods of interaction, and interface tools such as Nokia’s new homescreen, are a couple of the core threads that will be explored in more detail today.

Later on we’ll also be speaking with a number of key designers at Nokia (including the Head of Nseries design, responsible for the upcoming N97), and rolling out our video interviews with them throughout the week.

Plus, stay tuned for more stories and photos from today’s The Inside Story event, coming soon.

Photo from laverrue

Click to watch the full-length video on the making of the Nokia N97.

There’s no disguising the fact that this video has had the Hollywood polish applied to it - idyllic sweeping landscapes, smart camera effects and a do-or-die sort of soundtrack - but I must say it certainly pushes all the right buttons as it tells the grassroots story behind Nokia’s hottest upcoming handset. If you’re already fired up about the N97 this is a guaranteed goosebump giver.

The team behind the creation of the Nokia N97 is a global one with a shared vision that’s highlighted in this video. The project is based in Tokyo, with the industrial designer in Finland, the mechanics team in Tokyo, and software teams around the globe, straddling Boston, Dallas, India, China, Singapore. Many of the key players at Nokia behind the product step in front of the lens in this rare video to tell their piece of the story puzzle that fits together to make the N97, including Tomi Kuparinen, Product Program Manager and designer Shunjiro Eguchi.

Watch the making of the Nokia N97 video here >>

ESPOO, Finland

We do have this amazing HALO system for really good video conferencing. And we have a HALO room in Espoo and Singapore, so it made sense to invite the journalists in Singapore to connect to the people in Espoo via HALO.* We sat in on the round table discussion and took some video of what it was like (see below). Also, there were some great things said and some choice presentations. But we’ll hold off on those because we’re possibly having another round table in the near future.

So, read on to see what it was like and to see some video of the round table event.

Event summary
Using HALO, were were able to give Singapore journalists exposure to Nokia eco experts in an innovative and environmentally sensitive way. We invited mainstream as well as independent journalists based in Singapore. The main presentations were by Markus Terho, on Nokia’s environmental strategy; Francis Cheong, giving an update on activities Nokia has in Southeast Asia; Tiina Karhu, talking about environmental considerations in Design; and Ulla Uimonen, showing some cool things about package design.

There were 11 visitors cramming into the HALO room in Singapore (not counting the Nokia hosts). But that didn’t dampen the interest. The feedback we got was that while there were many global activities, it was nice also to hear about local initiatives, making the discussion more relevant. As usual, the visitors commented on how they weren’t aware of Nokia’s extensive environmental practices (we’re working on changing that). And everyone thought it was cool that we used HALO.

Bernard Leong told us that it was “a valuable session, in which I learned a lot.” He goes on to write on his site:

“The whole roundtable featured how Nokia as a corporation has navigated in making small changes through several eco-friendly initiatives - recycling, materials used for manufacturing and energy consumption. In fact, I am surprised that I did not know some interesting facts about how they are doing on sustainability and development in Southeast Asia.”

Nicholas Aaron, CNET Asia, wrote:

“This geek managed to join Nokia’s Virtual Eco-Roundtable this week where we video-conferenced via HP Halo into Finland and got a pretty good idea of Nokia’s green strategy, which includes their environmental programs in South East Asia Pacific (SEAP), environmental design, as well as packaging design.”

Repeat performance
It goes without saying, we were really happy with how it went. And like we said, there will be at least one more of these in the near future, but in the mean time, check out a compilation of the event below.

*By the way, we also have a HALO room in London and the Nokia Conversations team uses it every week. We use it so much that when we do come face to face, it takes us a moment to realize why it feels weird to be in the same physical location. That’s how good HALO is. Heh.

BARCELONA, Spain

I asked him to tell us about Eseries design, Nokia’s innovations in phone keyboards, and some special aspects of the E55.

To hear what he said, check out the video below.

Nokia has had QWERTY keyboards for some time now, starting with the Communicator back in the 90s. A few years back, the Nokia 9300 Communicator set the standard of usability in phone keyboards.

With the Nokia E75 and E55, Valtteri and his team pushed the design even further, working hard to innovate with both the format and the materials used in the devices.

Beta Labs has been around for a while, but they certainly hit their stride this year. While early on Beta Labs was making public the efforts of small innovative teams at Nokia, such as with the folks who made the S60 Calculator, this year they have been a major channel to introduce new versions of mainstream services and applications, such as Ovi Suite and Nokia Maps. Tommi Vilkamo is the driving force behind Nokia Beta Labs and we did a profile on him back in August.

Nokia Pilots is more recent, but we find it presents an interesting future for the company. At the heart of Nokia Pilots is the mixing of passionate users and the device creation process. By getting our devices earlier into user’s hands, we can collaboratively shape the way the product turns out. In the end, we get a better product, which is good for all of us.

Both these programs are breaking new ground for Nokia and have been well received by the public. We look forward to what the next year brings for these guys and wish them further success.

Related stories:
Inside the brain of Nokia Beta Labs
Nokia Pilots prepare for lift-off

See more of our Design stories