The Sony Open Planet Ideas Challenge wrapped up the first project stage, "Inspiration," a week ago, with 335 suggested environmental issues to tackle. After culling through the inspirations, the next phase, "Concepting," kicks off today with the announcement of the selected environmental brief.
The Inspiration phase brought out tons of great ideas from participants, with Urban Farming, Product Packaging, Deforestation, Water and Food Waste rising to the top as the most popular issues. With such a big starting question: "How can today's technology address the environmental challenges we're all facing?," the answers were bound to be tough to sort out. So tough to sort out, in fact, the team decided upon six prominent areas which are all encompassed by the theme of using resources more efficiently rather than focus on one single issue. The six resulting themes:
1. More with less: How can technology help us use our resources more efficiently?
2. Bringing the issues to life: How can technology close the gap between our actions and their impacts?
3. No such thing as waste: How can technology turn waste into something more useful?
4. Smarter Design: How can technology help us design less resource intensive products, services and infrastructure?
5. Smarter recycling: How can technology help us recycle more?
6. Behavior change: How can technology help us make the less resource intensive option the desirable option?
Now it's up to participants to use these inspirations to come up with technology mash-up solutions, build on others' suggestions, or just comment or applaud concepts they like. This concepting phase goes until November 29th, when the panel re-convenes to sift through the mash-ups.
We were curious about the challenges and process of this open-source concept, and had the chance to discuss the project up to this point with a few participating members of the Sony team: Emily Nicoll, general manager of environmental communications, Sony Europe, and Morgan David, head of Sony Broadcast and Professional Research Labs. Emily provided us with a bird's eye view of the process, while Morgan relayed in-depth insights from the engineering side.
Below, we talk with them about the transition from Inspiration to Concepting, what lessons the prior Forest Guard project brings to OPI, the value of the project overall, and how the community will be involved throughout the challenge.
