LONDON, United Kingdom – Nokia World 2011 isn’t just about applauding the keynote speech and new products, whatever they might be. It’s also a great opportunity for the Nokia community to listen to the views and challenges from other standpoints.

Who better to pose an alternative agenda than Tyler Brûlé, one of the most respected figures in modern media.

Brûlé, who founded style magazine Wallpaper, has done as much as anyone to influence the tastes and preferences of the world’s urban intelligensia over the past decade.

And you only have to glance at his current venture, Monocle magazine, to realise that he shares Nokia’s mission to think globally. Monocle has a broad remit, to visit any field of interest worthy of examination, whether that’s the situation in Afghanistan or a look at porecelain in Berlin.

For Brûlé, culture is the message, rather than the media itself and he will go to any lengths, it seems, to drill down into it for new truths and meanings. His quest is for the authentic, the natural and the essential.

And the Canadian has risked his life for his cause. Shot and seriously injured  in an ambush in Kabul while reporting on the civil war in Afghanistan in 1994, Brule went on to launch Wallpaper in 1996. Within a year he sold it to Time Inc who retained him as editorial director.

He then formed Winkreative, a branding, advertising and design house, which he still runs. By 2001, at the age of 33 he became the youngest person to win the British Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award.

Brûlé served on Dopplr’s board until the online business travel service was sold to Nokia in 2009. In February 2007 Brûlé launched his dream project, the journal Monocle. At Nokia World, you can bet Tyler will at the heart of the debate about design.

And we’ll be all ears, because his opinion doesn’t just matter, it influences key thinkers. And any challenges that come from him will be on everyone’s agenda until next year.

image credit: New Media Day