ISIAS initiative [9] established local workgroups to define sustainable Information Societyvisions for their region. The large-scale TERRA 2000 project [10] developed analytical“scenarios and models of present and future developments in order to support policy debateand decision aimed ultimately at optimising the contribution of Information SocietyTechnologies to Sustainable Development.”While these efforts clarified important policy choices to be made at the regional,European and global levels, they take a “broad picture” stance that is difficult to relate tothe Ambient Intelligence concept, which “places the user, i.e. the human being, at the centreof the future development of the knowledge-based society.”A step in this direction was instead taken in the ASSIST project [11], which developedthe concept of “immaterialisation of consumption” as a key area where IST can make asubstantial contribution (perhaps the only real one) to reducing resource use. The argumentis that even a substantial decrease in consumption through more efficient product life cyclesor transport schemes (as in the ISTAG Carmen scenario) will only lead to incrementalenvironmental benefits. Immaterialisation, as with for example downloading an MP3 filefor listening to music on an existing computer, instead causes a “switch moment drop” tozero material use.
3.3 – Lifestyles and Workstyles
As in the case of MP3, it soon becomes clear that the shift towards immaterialisation ismore a question of patterns of individual behaviour than one of global agreements, of consumption more than production. Yet, as the Oslo Declaration on SustainableConsumption [9] states:
“Efforts to develop consumption systems that are markedly more efficient and effective arestill largely unknown and to date there have been few practical steps toward realizing their implementation… this heretofore neglected dimension still requires comprehensiveinvestigation. Such research must systematically integrate efforts to promote improvementsin quality of life, to distinguish long-term structural trends in consumption patterns, and toidentify the social mechanisms and cultural aspects of consumer behavior and householddecision making.”
One could argue that on the contrary there has been almost too much research on“cultural aspects of consumer behavior and household decision making” in the fieldmarketing and product-oriented lifestyle studies. The aim here has not traditionally been tosave the planet but to sell products and services, and lifestyle marketing has gained a stronggrip on defining the value systems of current generations, to the chagrin of writers such as Naomi Klein [13].Returning to the sphere of IST-induced innovation, the above-mentioned ASSIST project carried out an analysis of why i-mode was so successful compared to the WAP platform launched in Europe at about the same time:
“DoCoMo plus i-mode (and the thousands of services and companies included in it) makean Integrated Lifestyle Package. The driver is 'a fun experience' that is, a wholly immaterialoutcome. How they achieved success was by taking a Total Lifestyle Approach.”
The danger with this analysis is that it tends to view a group or individual exclusively interms of consumption, as a carry-on effect of its marketing origin. We can balance thisview, and in addition get closer to the target world of much of the IST program, if weconsider lifestyles and “workstyles” as complementary concepts. While this latter is also amuch abused term, a sound definition is put forth by Eberhard Wenzel in his work on healthat the workplace [14]:
By
individual workstyles
, I refer to the occupational and organizational patterns of behavior and action of a person, by which normative expectations regarding workplace- and
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