Ericsson, the company that, with Sony, gave birth to Sony Ericsson in 2001, has unveiled its Life in 2020 project, which involved 450 experts from inside and outside the company coming together to predict how technology will be used in the future.
Erik Kruse, from Ericsson, headed up the project. His team included people from the consultancy firm McKinsey, as well as the Institute for the Future in California and the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies.
They were asked to draw together information on socio-economic trends, consumer buying patterns and the sustainability of certain technologies to determine how life will have changed in the next decade. This included whether social attitudes towards green products will have changed, what new industries may be providing employment, and whether issues like a growing elderly population may have been addressed.
The team then created 15 personas from 2020, including a 37-year old space engineer from New Zealand, a Brazilian farmer and a 22-year old computer specialist from Indonesia. On the 2020 website, you can see each of these people and then click on them to explore what technology, including specific gadgets, they use in their daily lives.
There are a total of 70 hypothetical mobile devices and services for these characters, delivered by 22 hypothetical companies.