Information technologies and multimedia communications are enabling more effective, more personal interaction between people in disparate locations, thereby raising the possibility that many meetings can transpire without anyone having to travel.

At KTH’s Centre for Sustainable Communications, researchers from a wide variety of fields and industrial players such as Ericsson are joined in a mission to bring to market technologies that could make many communication practices sustainable.

Center Director Helene Wintzell says that one of the center’s chief focus areas is making virtual meetings the norm, thereby freeing up time, reducing costs and relieving the environment of added pollution. “We envision a society transformed by new sustainable solutions through innovative media and communication services. Multimedia will have an enormous impact,” she says.

The center began in April 2007 with a 10-year grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems as well as funding from KTH and Ericsson, among other commercial partners.

One of the center’s initial projects is the development of tools that can measure social, economic and environmental sustainability in the information and communication technology (ICT) area. Wintzell says that this work will produce indicators that, for example, can be included in companies’ corporate social responsibility reports. “We know quite well how to measure the environment. But we need to know how to measure ICT’s social impacts,” she says.

A key social benefit of ICT is the freeing up of time, which the Centre for Sustainable Communications hopes to achieve with its Mediated Spaces project.

Mediated Spaces aims to make virtual meetings more attractive by using a technique developed at KTH that enables videoconference participants to make direct eye contact. “You get the sense that you’re sitting at the same table with the person, so it is a much higher quality communication,” Wintzell says. In one of the center’s projects, the technology is used for psychiatric therapy sessions, she says. “The preliminary results are very promising, proving that sensitive meetings can be mediated successfully.”

Mediated meetings can also increase accessibility to public services in remote areas. In a pilot study conducted by the center, the technology was used by the government unemployment service in Sweden’s rural Dalarna region to enable caseworkers to meet with clients remotely. As a result, clients can go to meeting places closer to home, instead of having to go to the administrative center. And case workers no longer need to drive. “Instead of sitting in traffic, they can spend that time with their clients or their families,” Wintzell says.

“When you have effective meetings with multimedia and ICT, you can save time, money, and the environment.”

Wintzell says that Ericsson’s data in the area of ICT and its industry experience are critical resources for these projects. “The company was very eager to start this center. Ericsson is participating in several of our projects, and it’s very helpful for researchers at KTH to have an industrial partner with a global vision, as they do.”

“That industry perspective is necessary for creating the business ideas and the spin-offs that are the purpose of the center,” she says. “The ultimate goal is to commercialize the research.”