Comment travaillent les équipes de Nokia Design à la conception des Smartphones ?

De passage à Paris pour répondre à des questions via un "Twitter Café" le mardi 30 Novembre (#NokiaDesign), Niilo Alfthan, Senior design Manager à répondu à quelques questions concernant la création des smartphones. 

Can you tell us about the imperatives of design of smartphones?

Mobile devices today are already about a lot more than just voice or SMS messaging. Many people use their mobile as their main camera, music player or email device because it’s always with them and always connected. Our objective is to help making their overall experience, whichever of these services they are using, more relevant and enjoyable.

The internet is changing what we want to do with our mobiles, using them more and more to connect digitally to people, places and information. As designers, we are exploring new ways to make this communication as intuitive to use as voice has become. This means designing for use in the hand or with the body and not just held to the ear, creating innovative new input methods, menus and new interfaces that fit the new internet experiences. Our designers are constantly looking for new ideas and spotting signals for emerging trends. They are also shaping trends that they expect will have a major impact on how we use mobile communication in our lives in the future.

How do you work on creating a design?

(Time, staff, materials, panel, travel ..) We observe and then design. First we try to understand the way people live and their aspirations, and then use these to inspire designs that meet these, so they will they will want and love to use them. Our designers visit different locations around the world to immerse themselves in lifestyle, design and cultural trends, bringing these local insights back into the design studios to inspire and influence exciting new designs.

They work on several phases of design – industrial design to create the form, colors and materials design, user interface design and innovations, and several stages of testing their designs with real people and then refining them before the final product is decided upon.

This is always teamwork which includes a lot of discussing all the way through the process. A device can take anything from a year to two years to design from start to finish, and involved many different people. Team work is crucial to achieving the right design.

Do you think the mobile in five years will be very different than today?

We have seen a huge amount of convergence around the mobile phone over the past few years, from straightforward communication device to lifestyle object delivering entertainment such as music and gaming for example, navigation, imaging and video capture.

Mobile technology offers many new opportunities. Your handset could become your electronic wallet, monitor and report upon your health, deliver education services, allow you to remotely monitor your home or become the keys to your house and car. The big question is not “what could your mobile phone do next?” – the question we are asking at Nokia is “What should your mobile phone do next – and why?”

This focus on the “what should” rather than the simple “what could” ensures that when we propose new concepts for mobile devices and services they are backed up with a deep understanding of consumer needs and behaviors as well as insight into what makes this a better experience via mobile device rather than traditional methods. Are our customers comfortable using their mobile device as a wallet, house keys, car keys? If not, why? What can we do to address these issues and make the experience relevant and compelling?

Are the recyclable materials will take the lead, what deadline? Will it change the smartphones look?

We have a long track record of taking sustainability into account in all we do. For us, sustainability is not a trend: it’s our way of doing business, and is made up of every day actions in everyday work.

Our environmental work is based on life cycle thinking. This means that we aim to minimize the environmental impact of our products at every stage of our operations, beginning with the extraction of raw materials and ending with recycling, treatment of waste, and recovery of used materials. We achieve this by better product design, close control of our production processes, and greater material reuse and recycling. Nokia strives to be a leader in sustainability. While taking sustainability into account in everything we do, we are also looking beyond our own operations – how the over 1.3 billion people who own a Nokia phone can enhance and enrich their lives and make responsible choices.