Nokia, connecting people

London. We met with Axel Meyer, Entertainment & Media design manager for Nokia Design, at the Epoca Café in Saint Martins Lane, one of the first illy bars in the British capital city. Axel arrives, loaded with baggage. But his largest piece of luggage is also the least bulky one: it’s his inseparable Nokia 7650, a kind of synthetic memory through which he can keep in touch with his family, friends and colleagues.

To Axel, born in Argentina and settled in Finland, London is just a stop-over between the out-of-the-way city of Oulu – the Nokia city just a few kilometres away from the Arctic Circle, where winter nights last for 20 hours – and the lost but sunny city of Los Angeles, his next destination.

“Nokia, connecting people”, rather than an advertisement, it is a mission.
Today everyone is connected with everyone else, there are unlimited possibilities, every personal network of contacts is as thick as the phone directory of a medium-sized town. Now it is up us to decide what to do with it, meaning that the limit is of a human nature. In my case, for instance, I am constantly in touch with my family and friends in Argentina & Spain, even though I spend a lot of my time travelling around the globe. I am free to move around without for that matter feeling less close to the persons I love. This is what I need, a sense of freedom. Technology has made possible applications that were unthinkable of until recently, but what we want to stress in our “connecting people” message is precisely the term “people”; technology is meaningless without the people using it and hopefully becomes invisible. It is all about human communication at the end.

When you innovate, do you try to respond to real needs?
They are not always basic needs such as, for example, security, being able to place a call in case of danger, but the environment around us is changing continuously, demanding responses that are in line with the new needs. Who knows, maybe the strong need to establish relations, to belong to a given community has become a basic need in modern times. Even amusement itself becomes essential to a society that think cannot afford to waste time, where every single moment of the day needs to be occupied or kind of feeling like it.

The fact of being “always on”, always reachable, is it really a necessity?
Surely today real freedom is being able to and wanting to switch your mobile phone off. We are so afraid of missing out opportunities that we feel forced to be reachable at all times, but in this case too it all depends on the type of person using the phone. During the early mobile phone years, this tool dominated over private and public behaviour, while today people are learning to use it appropriately and the matured in the way to live with it. What we are actually speaking about is a tool that describes what we are like: keeping it switched on at a restaurant or at the cinema, at a high volume or an obsessively rhythmical ringing tone, can only be a sign of ill-manners.

Total freedom, but to tell each other what?
Actually we are all “story-tellers”, we need to communicate with others; the problem is when there is nothing left in your life that is 
worth telling. You go out, to the movies, to the gym, hoping to make your life meaningful again. Curiously enough, when answering the phone we do not say “hi, how are you?” anymore, but “hi, where are you?” Maybe whoever is listening is more interested in what is around us than in how we really feel.

What is the future for connections?
Mobile devices will increasingly become channelling tools for emotions and Nokia will dedicate an area that is ever increasing and powerful, but it will always be up to you to decide how to use it and how to live and re-experience life.