Panel discussion

Images of the future

Panelists: 

• Peter Nöu, Senior Program Manager at The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova)
• Ambjörn Naeve, Senior Researcher, KTH
• Erika Öhlund, PhD-student, Södertörns Högskola

Content: Course participants have been presented with a variety of images of the future. This lecture won't be a lecture at all, but rather a discussion between invited guests who are expected to have widely differing ideas and opinions about the future, and about the future of sustainability. Can we imagine a future sustainable society? What would it look like? What are our chances and what is our best course of action in attempting to reach that future? Furthermore, what is the role of ICT and media in relation to these questions and issues? 

About the panelists:

Peter Nõu is Senior Program Manager with The Swedish Government Agency of Innovation Systems (VINNOVA). He is central in defining and administering sectors of 'Information Society' and 'Sustainable Cities' within the 'Vinnova Grand Challenges Program'. Open data, crowd sourcing and intensive prizes are other initiatives he’s been driving since joining Vinnova in late 2008, as a senior expert in the ICT and services sectors. Prior to joining Vinnova, Peter worked 15+ years in CTO and CIO roles in various industries and startups, always engaged in implementing strategic advantages of Internet technologies. This became a passion of his already 20 years ago, when as employed by the Swedish Government, he saw the birth of the Internet economy in Silicon Valley during the years 1992-94. He later joined Telia Research and helped launch Passagen, the Swedish 'First Wave Large Portal'. Peter has also worked in the strategic management consulting firm SMG. His degree is in Engineering Physics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.
Ambjörn Naeve is a senior researcher at KTH with a background in mathematics, physics, and computer science. For the last fifteen years he has been working with knowledge management and technology enhanced learning with a focus on methods and tools for communicative modeling, unplanned collaboration and disagreement management. He has long been an advocator of what he calls "the big switch", by what he means a transformation away from today's large-scale (globalized) production society - backed by our present small-scale and closed-access information society - towards more of a small(er) scale production society - backed by a large(r) scale and open-access information society. Apart from the environmental necessities, such a transformation would also incease social sustainability.
Erika Öhlund is a PhD candidate in Environmental Science at Södertörn University. Having a degree in International Economics, she is doing her PhD project within the research field Ecological Economics. In this field, the economic and social systems are considered to be dependent on the natural system, i.e. limited natural resources, processes and functions. Implications of this assumption is e.g. limits on economic growth and the search for social systems that can handle zero economic growth. In her PhD project, she analyzes agriculture in Sweden and Poland using theories about marketization, commodification, incommensurability of values, and degrowth.