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Genevieve Bell: Inspiring Innovation by Putting People First Written by Yoon-Jung Lee, Doctoral Candidate and Dissertation Writer Practicing anthropology outside academia is a career path discussed or hinted at in few anthropology classes. Genevieve Bell had to make the imaginative leap into anthropology outside the university, when Intel Corporation, a leading multi-national semiconductor technology company, offered her a research position in 1998. She had just finished her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Stanford with a focus in Native American studies and ethnohistory. Despite the fact that her future managers were vague about what she might do with them, Bell eventually accepted the job and joined the People and Practices Research Lab – a small group of research social scientists located in one of Intel’s advanced research and development labs. Bell felt trepidation at accepting the job. But the challenge of making anthropology and anthropological insights relevant in this new domain was too a good chance to pass up. “I wondered what I was doing, and if it was the right thing, but ultimately I just couldn’t say no to the challenge of it all,” Bell recounted. Her early days at Intel were exhausting: “I had a policy of saying ‘yes’ to everything and, as a result, I spent a lot of time trying to explain to engineers and computer scientists why people were important and why knowing something about what they cared about could fundamentally shape the way new technology was developed.” During her years of fieldwork in Asia and Europe, Bell spent time in the homes of hundreds of different families, getting a sense of what made them tick and what they cared about. “It was a remarkable privilege, and something I suspect I could never had done from an academic job,” she said. Ten years later, Bell is now the Director of User Experience Group at Intel and one of the most prominent among about thirty anthropologists at Intel. She attracted strong media attention, especially since she started a multi-sited research study of technology use in Asia in 2001, a study that involved fieldwork in seven countries over a period of three years. That large-scale field research project was partly motivated by Bell’s discomfort with certain elements of the technology industry’s grand visions of ubiquitous computing and the smart home, particularly the notion of a global middle class as a homogeneous social group who would use technology products in the same way.1 Bell recalled challenging one of her managers, a Vice-President of Research, and asking: “What if our vision of ubiquitous computing is so secular, so profoundly embedded in a set of Western discourses, that we’ve created a vision of the world that shuts out a percentage of people in a way we can’t really even begin to articulate?”2 ANTHROPOLOGY 2007 / 2008 NEWSLETTER . VOLUME 1
After countless field trips to Asia, she brought to Intel and the technology industry a long list of cases that challenged conventional ideas about the home, personhood, mobility, innovation and tradition: Indonesian families who shared mobile phones among family members, Chinese consumers who appreciated the lunar almanac on their phones, Muslims in Malaysia who used their mobile phones to locate Mecca during prayer times, and Muslim and Hindu homes where technology products were not welcome due to their ill fit with social ideas about home as a space of purity, simplicity, and modesty. Bell’s work and also that her peers helped shaped many things at Intel from future strategic product directions, to venture capital investments, and to marketing messages. This larger body of ethnographic research also helped drive new product and technology innovation, generating products that were responsive to local cultural practices and that made sense in their environments. As part of the larger Digital Home Group at Intel, Bell’s team (consisting of research social scientists, interaction designers, and human factors engineers) has recently focused on the home— in its various forms and permutations. In addition to her continued work on the intersections of technology and religion, Bell has also been interested in developing the concept of “domestic satellites,” or homelike spaces away from home. She not only thinks about technology opportunities presented by such domestic extension, but also asks hard questions about these “homes away from home,” where people find a respite from work and technology-saturated life. On her message posted on Intel’s blog, she asks: “have [our homes] become so overly embedded with information, communication and entertainment technologies? And if that is one of the findings, what should a multinational company that produces technology do with such an insight?”3 CONTinued ON PG 25...