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ShareBangalore: Industrial design may be an interesting field to be in, but to go about designing a consumer device which will be used by millions across the globe requires more than an understanding of design aesthetics. Jonne Harju, senior design manager at Nokia who was in the city as part of a promotion programme for Nokia N97-Mini says it needs to localised for the needs of people around the world.
"Nokia's design decisions are built around people and their cultures. We have people who travel around the world, live with people in Mumbai, Shanghai, London and in many other cities. These people try to understand the lifestyles of people around the globe and try to build stories which then inspire our design," he says.
"Look at this phone for example," he says pointing at the bronze N97 Mini he held in his hand. "A phone with this colour would never sell in the European market. People prefer the traditional black or white colours. But in markets like India and China, people look for bright vibrant colours. This particular colour was a decision made by the India team," he says.
Another factor, apart from culture that has really influenced Nokia's design principles, is their motto to bring people together. "People like sharing things," Jonne says addressing the few bloggers who had turned up for the interaction. "They want to tell their friends where they are, what they are doing and the happiness of people depends a lot on the responses they get to these status messages on social networking sites. Almost 10 hours worth of content is uploaded every minute from a Nokia device to Youtube. There are millions of photos being uploaded on flickr. So a phone should not just be a business machine but also be able to include these fun elements," he adds.
Jonne has been in the field of design for 12 years now -- the last four years with Nokia, when he was part of the team that developed seven devices."I have always worked with N series devices in Nokia, the first one being N85. N97-Mini is the seventh," he adds.
The work on N97-Mini took only 14 months in comparison to the 18 months it generally takes to design and develop mobile phone models. The model is a slimmed down version of the original N97 which launched a few months back. "We started working on this device even before N97 was launched, so it was a challenge as we did not have the feedback on the original device. Our main goal was to make a smaller, slimmer device without taking away the functionality. We made the edges a bit more rounded, reduced the screen size and took away the camera cover, so the design depends a lot on what kind of a phone you need to make. Our goal was to slim it down and we did,"Joanne adds.
The new model also has a few localised apps which are capable of pulling in news from local newspapers depending on your location and will also have more apps for Indian consumers.
