When Genevieve Bell agreed to leave Stanford University for a job at Intel in 1998, it was with trepidation. She had, after all, been working her entire life toward being an academic, following the tenure track and accepting that practical applications of her work might never become apparent.
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"My vision was to survive the first year and not go insane," she says now.
It's not that she thought Intel was such a bad place to be. Quite the opposite. She just couldn't see why a semiconductor company would want a technologically challenged cultural anthropologist on staff.
Now, as she writes up a final report on her three-year study of how Asian families interact with technology, Ms. Bell can't imagine working anywhere else.
"It's proved to be so much more than I could have expected," she says. "It has turned into a remarkable job."
In turn, Ms. Bell has been credited with performing a remarkable job by making anthropology accessible -- and worthwhile -- to scores of engineers all over the world.
A native of Sydney, Ms. Bell grew up at her mother's anthropology field site in central Australia north of Alice Springs. She had just finished her dissertation on boarding schools for Native Americans when she met an engineer in a Palo Alto bar. This man's company had just received a major investment from Intel and was intrigued by the notion that Ms. Bell's anthropological expertise might help both companies develop better products.
After conducting an initial study of technology uses in western Europe, Ms. Bell realized that American engineers assumed that a global middle class was emerging in Asia that was interested in buying and using consumer electronics in the same way the Western world did.
But was there?
To answer that question, she began working with local ethnographers in India, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and Korea (a list that her administrative assistant short-handed as I AM SICK). The ethnographers helped her find families in each country who were willing to let her move in with them for a few days to watch how they interacted with each other as well as with the technology in their homes and offices.
While most of her field work could be done in English, she found that working in countries like Malaysia, where various Chinese dialects are spoken, could be just as productive. "I began to hear the term 'kiasu,' for which there was no English counterpart," she says. "They would use it in talking about the education of their kids, when they were concerned about their kids not being left behind." Kiasu refers generally to the parental effort to provide private tutoring and after-school educational experiences.
So, what new gadgets have emerged as a result of her research? That's the wrong question to ask, she insists.
"Anthropology helps designers imagine a world where their technology impacts lives differently depending on the culture and mindset of that place," she says.
Her efforts aren't limited to American designers, either.
"I had a lovely moment with some guys in the States and some guys in Malaysia," she remembers. "I was explaining to them that one of the differences between Asia and the U.S. has to do with the physical size and configuration of people's homes. Intel is very interested in the digital home, and we have to be careful about the assumptions we're making about what that home looks like."
When an American designer said that each of his kids had PCs in their rooms, "the guys in Malaysia said, 'Wow! Your kids have their own rooms? Aren't they lonely?'"
Ms. Bell found it very easy after that to explain that there are very few forms of universal human truth, but lots of forms of cultural logic and truths. The Malaysians, she says, worry that their children would be lonely if they weren't sharing a room with siblings. The Americans, she says, were reverting to their cultural model of everyone wanting to have their own stuff in their own place.
During her travels, Ms. Bell found people in China who take their mobile phones to a temple to be blessed, Muslims who used the GPS capabilities of their phones to locate Mecca for their prayers and Asian families who burned paper cell phone offerings for their ancestors to use in the next world.
All of these anecdotes and observations are used to create generalized "personas" toward which design teams then can focus new ideas. As a component supplier, Intel's designers don't create specific new products based on anthropological studies. Instead, Intel helps guide its own customers -- the computer and gadget makers -- about how Intel's technology might help them do so.
"In essence, we're reducing risk (for component buyers) by taking on an increasing amount of end-user product R&D," explains Herman D'Hooge, innovation strategist for the platform and solutions division of Intel's desktop platforms group. "We're also reducing risk by starting out with understanding user needs and desires, and have those guide product innovation."
Or, as Ms. Bell puts it: "Anthropology is about changing the way people think."
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