Portable cathedrals: the Nokia N9, and contemporary product design

The game of phones, and how it changed what design is

In the reception of Nokia House, the company’s hulking steel and glass HQ overlooking the Baltic between Helsinki and Espoo, there is a giant sculpture of a gold chessboard, intriguingly without pieces. Presumably installed long before the company’s current travails amidst the choppiest of market environments, the board inadvertently suggests the great game that Nokia is embroiled within.

Each mobile phone handset is not a mere product, perhaps like the other products that have traditionally adorned the pages of this magazine — as a chair is, or a lighting fixture is. Instead, each handset is a play in a wider global contest, a node in logistics networks of immense scale and complexity, a platform for an ecosystem of applications, an exemplar of the internet of things, a window onto the daily interactions of billions of users, of their ever-changing personalities and cultures, a product that consumers traditionally consider the most important in their possession, after the keys to their home.

The phone is an intimate device, not simply through its ubiquity and connectivity, its relationship with the body. While objects have long been cultural choices and symbolic goods, the mobile phone, being…