Fiction made fact: tech goes sustainable

Imagine being able to wave your smart phone across a product and instantly know how much it was contributing to flooding or poverty in Bangladesh. Sounds a bit ‘Minority Report’ perhaps, but it’s already possible to make instant purchasing decisions based on the sustainability credentials of products on shelves. Barcoo, a new phone app allows you to ‘see’ a company’s environmental and social impacts, simply by scanning the on-pack barcode.

At Forum we track ‘weak signals’ like this: ideas, trends, technologies or behaviour changes that are as yet unrecognised by mainstream society. They might have a big impact or they might disappear. We monitor them to help our partners challenge their assumptions about the future, navigate risk and seize new opportunities.

The idea of increased immediate access to product sustainability information driving transparency in business appeared in a recent report we produced with T-labs, Deutsche Telekom's research laboratories. The report, Fiction becomes fact: sustainable information technology in 2020 explores the role that future information communications technologies could play in a sustainable world in 2020.

Machine to machine communication, augmented reality – allowing additional information regarding people or objects to be displayed, and the ‘internet of things’ – where every manufactured or processed product is trackable and traceable in real-time, are among the technologies that look likely to play a greater role in our lives in 2020. We helped T-labs think through how the potential of these technologies can be harnessed to drive sustainability.

The project also looked at the emerging implications of these technologies. As more and more information becomes available and is shared, will access to this information about the world around us be universal and act as a social leveller, or will it create a divide? In terms of personal information, notions of privacy will evolve. There will be more ways that our current version of personal privacy can be breached. It will become more and more difficult for individuals to control what information exists about them and who has access to it.

And of course, we have the issue of the energy consumption of the technologies themselves. Initiatives like the ICT for Energy Efficiency Forum, where industry players commit to better understand their footprint as a whole and agree on targets in line with or exceeding climate change targets are an important step.

Ultimately, the aim of this project was to help Deutsche Telekom look ahead to the behaviour changes and technological developments that they want to create and communicate this across the business. But the work also helps to anticipate some of the future problems so Deutsche Telekom is better positioned to deal with them. This is the real power of our horizon scanning work, an invaluable tool to help drive the transition to the sort of life we want – and need – in the future.

Find out more about the projector download the full report Fiction becomes fact: sustainable information technology in 2020