Focus

The challenges that organisations developing innovative ICT based products and services for the home will face in the next 10-15 years will be quite different than the ones they have faced these last 10-15 years.

The last two decades have seen a tremendous progress in the ICT field: intelligent devices, “information highways”, the Internet, mobile telephony, laptops, in-home networks, IPTV, etc. just boomed in our everyday’s life. This progress, occurring at a time of steady growth of economies and intense consumerism, enabled the development of a wide range of innovative products and services that more and more people can use today in their homes to manage their equipments, ensure their security, access information and entertain, work from home, etc.

The two decades ahead of us will be different: today’s economies are facing a serious downturn that may take a long time to end, the use of earth’s resources and the impact of human activity on the environment have reached critical points, the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth within and between countries has a worrying potential of important social instability… In order to avoid major future crises and ensure the sustainable development of their societal models, all countries have to significantly revise their economic, environment, and social objectives.

It is in this context that innovative products and services for the home, among which those based on ICT, will have to be developed in the future. Of course, further progress in the ICT field has to be expected but this progress will have to be put at the service of more “sustainable homes”, and beyond of sustainable cities. “Sustainability” rather than “high-tech” will be the main differentiation criteria of tomorrow’s homes (or apartment buildings or community areas).

At the present preliminary stage of development of the “ICT for sustainable homes” domain, it is still difficult to anticipate which will be the key technologies or standards in the domain, the “killing applications”, the most dominant players, etc. It is expected that the successive editions of the “ICT for sustainable homes” event will allow getting more and more precise answers to these questions.

What we can do today is to introduce the different issues to take in consideration, to present the pieces of the puzzle:

• homes will be more and more designed or renovated with the objective to consume less energy (and take advantage of renewable energies), and to have the lowest impact on the environment all along their life cycle (limited use of earth resources, limitation of greenhouse gases emissions, etc.)
• ICT cannot only contribute to making homes “greener” (ICT for energy management, for environment monitoring, etc.) but more globally to ensure a more sustainable life (ICT for the elderly and the handicapped, ICT for all, ICT for social networking and interaction with local services, etc.)
• Consumers will remain essentially different and customisation will remain a key word but it is probable that more and more consumers will look for more affordable and “meaningful” products and services (not “gadgets”), durable (upgradable), and even reusable or recyclable ones.

Useful links

Among the large amount of resources that can be usefully browsed to better apprehended challenges and possible solutions we would recommend the two following portals:

• The website of the ICT for sustainable growth Unit of European Commission’s DG Information Society and Media, providing in particular substantial information of the policy, programme and projects related to ICT for energy efficiency and other emerging fields,
• The website of the PARADISO project coordinated by Sigma Orionis, who organised the “ICT for a global sustainable future” conference in January 2009 at the European Commission in Brussels and released a “reference document”.