Restart.

At the time of writing we’re in the middle of a global pandemic of a kind that very few of us have experienced before. To many these are worrying times, and fully understandably so. Lock downs, physical distancing, working from home, etc have presented us with challenges and choices that we have had little need to consider in our lives up until now. To say that our societies are struggling a bit with coming to terms with these new conditions isn’t an exaggeration. However, conversations about how to restart the world when the curves start to flatten are also forming rapidly, something that has made me think of a project that our team worked on a while back. Apart from investigating the future of technology it also illustrates where and how to focus your efforts in order to create both societal and business meaning and value.

My colleagues and I used to be the Strategic Design team at Ericsson Research. Our assignment was to advise the company about desirable futures, sometimes through reports but more often by designed concepts and prototypes. One of the more fundamental questions for us was where to start looking for the trajectories into the future that we could investigate further. There is no shortage of trends or forecasts that describe how the world is changing, so which ones to listen to more than others? In the early 2010’s, when working on our team’s own long term strategy, we began to see some signs in the world around us that we found quite interesting to elaborate on further. The basic idea that we ended up with wasn’t very complicated, at least not on paper:

If the world is listing 17 topics or areas — such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) — that it considers to be of outmost importance to address and solve, aren’t those great indicators for where a high tech company should try to make a difference?

It’s pretty basic really — If there is a domain or area in need of improvement and you think that you can solve this, then there is a good chance of also doing good business. The thing with the SDGs is that they more or less function as blueprints of real world needs that one can start to explore in order to see if what you are good at can make a positive difference, and if so, how.

So that is what we did. Our team started to look at the SDGs in order to identify openings or opportunities for ICT in general, and mobile communication in particular. Almost at the same time Ericsson formed a partnership with UN-Habitat, something that we found interesting to engage in since cities and urbanisation (as covered by SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities) had already been shortlisted by us as particularly interesting areas to look into. This eventually led to a several years long project (of course with sub deliverables!) that illustrates how new forms of collaborative interactions between public, private, and civil society stakeholders can address global grand challenges in a variety of novel and relevant ways. In order to understand the challenges and opportunities with the rapid urbanisation in the world, and how telecom can make a difference, we collaborated with a variety of partners throughout the process. These include large multi national organisations like UN-Habitat, private sector representatives such as Arup, WDO, and others, and the public sector such as municipalities in Stockholm, Skellefteå, Johannesburg etc. Already from the start of the project it was explicitly stated that each stakeholder’s unique perspective was needed to properly address the various aspects of the truly complex issue of urbanisation.

This project allowed us to view current and future technologies in the light of the challenges and opportunities presented by the global urbanisation trend. By addressing this with our various partners we were able to not only identify novel proposals for what our company and industry can focus on, but also to ensure that what we were proposing was relevant in the sense that they addressed real human, societal, and business needs. As for tangible outcomes we developed several examples of using 5G and edge computing enabled mixed reality for urban planning, both as internal technology prototypes but also as field trial demonstrators together with global and local partners. The following movie from a joint mixed reality pilot in Johannesburg where we collaborated with UN-Habitat, Johannesburg Development Agency, and Witts University, describes the latter really well:

This project serves as a good example of how it is possible to identify and address meaning and value from both society and business perspectives. In this particular activity some key aspects were instrumental for the completion of the project — aspects that we have observed in other projects as well:

• Grand challenges, as expressed in the Sustainable Development Goals, are excellent pointers to what the world is trying to solve. They are urgent issues that present both challenges and opportunities that make a real difference to a tremendous amount of people, organisations, societies, and countries. If one wants to understand some of the directions in which development for the future will happen, the SDGs are really good guides.
• Diverse collaboration is paramount. Grand challenges are more or less school book examples of wicked problems and can rarely (if ever) be solved by sole actors working in isolation. Instead they have to be approached from a variety of perspectives that are represented by different stakeholders and partners. The key — which sometimes is really difficult — is to establish a process in which all of these partners can contribute to the overall project while at the same time receive something back, such as in insights, examples, competence, etc. This puts a lot of responsibility on the methods and processes used, which have to be co-creating oriented and characterised by both structure and exploration at the same time.
• Design thinking — and doing. We believe that addressing wicked problems using a design approach is really effective. Designers are trained in being both structured and creative and to ensure that the outside in perspective is maintained — i.e. that what is being designed and developed is addressing the real needs and opportunities of the recipients and stakeholders in question. To many people this sounds quite a bit like design thinking, and we agree. However, we also strongly believe that if you are designing ideas and concepts that describe something that doesn’t yet exist, and you want to really involve stakeholders — ranging from citizens/end users to policy makers– in this process, you also have to do the design that you have been thinking about. By allowing stakeholders to experience what you envision you create shortcuts in the conversations about what you are trying to solve or introduce. Furthermore, to experience a solution rather than just read about it in a report helps people to imagine in much more detail (and consequently understand) what your proposal might mean to them.

In this project we and our partners explored both the format for the work as well as the topic itself. There is much more to tell, but perhaps also to ask, so please don’t hesitate to comment below or get in direct contact with me.

If anyone is interested in the final report of the Ericsson / UN-Habitat collaboration focused on “Mixed reality for public participation in urban and public space design” it can be found at: https://unhabitat.org/node/142878

My colleague Marcus Nyberg has also written a blog post about the project: https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/6/urban-design-mixed-reality-un-habitat.