ETech goes sustainable

O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, aka ETech, is going all sustainable on us with the title of 2009’s event revealed as Living, Reinvented: The Technology of Abundance and Constraints. An excerpt rom today’s Call for Participation:

The 2009 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference will focus on exploring the emerging trends in the technologies that affect our everyday lives, including:

* City Tech: Our cities are growing, getting bigger faster than ever before. People are rushing to them in search of economic and social opportunity—jobs, urban living, and access to culture. How can technology help us create livable, prosperous, sustainable cities? What should mass transit look like? How can we infuse urban infrastructure with sustainability? How are cities using citizens’ data to become smarter? What can economics tell us about the way urban populations will change and behave?

* Materials & Mechanics: Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We’ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?

* Geek Family: Digital native mothers and fathers are starting their own families. How is that changing home technology? Education technology? What does the future geek home look like and how does it function?

* Nomadism & Shedworking: As cities and their suburbs rapidly increase their footprint, there are some who reject the crowded living conditions, but take advantage of the connectedness. They adopt a high-tech lifestyle within the constraints of a smaller space or take their posessions and their bits with them on the road, to the farthest reaches of the globe. How do they do this and what can we learn from them?

* Sustainable Life: The American lifestyle is unsustainable. How do we move to one-Earth economy? What are Europeans doing? Will Dubai be the trendsetter with its newest sustainable city? How will a renewed interest in environmental design affect us? Last year’s keynoter Alex Steffen posited that it would be technology driving the change, not a restriction of habits or an energy diet. Right now the abundant world is being changed by rising oil and medical costs, forcing change. What technology will break through?

* Life Hacking & Information Overload: We are bombarded with too much information, but at least some of it is relevant. What are the tools that we can use to process it? How can we identify the subset we actually care about? How do we identify the necessary bits of information that makes us more productive? Can we use cognitive science to help us deal with modern day living? What does neuroscience tell us about our brains and how we should handle learning and processing? Will ubicomp be able to help us stave off the overload or will it hasten our doom?

I am tempted to propose a couple of talks, one to fit into the Life Hacking & Information Overload category about the psychology of email, which I’m doing a lot of work on at the moment. The other would fit maybe into City Tech category and would be about designing for the indoors cat. There’s a pretty big overlap between geeks and cats, I think I can be fairly sure that there won’t be anyone else proposing a Cat Tech talk. And I very much hope that Alex Johnson proposes a talk on Shedworking - he’s got to be a world expert on the subject!