💡Sidetalking reveals how technological “failure” exposes the fragile negotiations between design intent, user practice, and cultural meaning. What counts as "Innovation" or "failure" depends on negotiations over time between designers, organizations, and publics.

🔄 (Back to the article) Sidetalking exposes how design, culture, and use are interdependent and negotiated through discourse, identity, and everyday practice.

More contemporary narratives are calling the NGage “ahead of its time.” And framing sidetalking as a "making do" design innovation.

(Quick aside) Nokia is based in Tampere, and local sensibilities dictated that my research on 'booth babes' be presented behind a curtain at the exhibition.

Example below:

🇫🇮 In Finland (home of Nokia) , sidetalking became a question of national identity as much as design. Local media balanced confusion with loyalty, reflecting how domestication operates not only in households but within national imaginaries of technological success.

😂 Users made sense of the design through ridicule and parody—posting memes of bananas, alarm clocks, and consoles.

🗣️ Widely ridiculed as a technological misstep. Our analysis of contemporary Finnish media indicates that this stemmed from a lack of communication. Nokia never explained sidetalking’s purpose; without a story, consumers filled the gap with ridicule.

🏗️ Marketers wanted the sideways hold for distinctiveness and branding, overriding practicalities and problems engineers anticipated, revealing how internal hierarchies within organizations can shape technology.

🎮 Sidetalking symbolized the ambition for Nokia to shift from phones to a “convergent multimedia” paradigm, where phones were both media devices and symbols of youth 'cool' identity. Nokia’s first big attempt to redefine the mobile as a multimedia device.

🧩 Nokia’s designers worked with strong assumptions about the cool, tech-savvy youth they believed would use it, and embedded these assumptions into the phone’s form—showing how design encodes social imaginaries.

📱 Sidetalking was a deliberate design choice, not an accident.
Our archival/curatorial research demonstrates that Nokia engineered sidetalking to appeal to, and embody a playful, youth-oriented identity.

The article emerged from the exhibition 'A Fantastic Failure' (Fanhtastinen Floppi - in Finnish), which was exhibited at Museokeskus Vapriikki from October 2023 to December 2024, and is now at Tekniikan Museo/Museum of Technology in Helsinki (until 8.11.25):

www.tekniikanmuseo.fi/en/exhibitio...

Co authored with my @coegamecult.bsky.social college @sotamaa.bsky.social and two curators from The Finnish Museum of Games at Museoskus Vapriikki in Tampere: Heikki Jungman and Dr Niklas Nylund.

How many Tamperes you got?

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