GENEVIEVE BELL HAS A RADICAL IDEA. Bell, the only female among Intel’s ros- ter
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GENEVIEVE BELL HAS A RADICAL IDEA. Bell, the only female among Intel’s ros- ter of top technical talent dubbed Intel Fellows, and Director of Intel’s User Experience Group, thinks the world would be a better place if we can better under- stand how people would like to use technology, rather than tossing technology that people don’t really want into the market at an alarming pace. Bell was given her own lab at Intel in 2010, an event that may change Intel, or even the future of technology itself. “Imagine,” says Bell, “If we were willing to take on board the ways in which PCs don’t work and applied that to other technologies such as our refrigerators or televisions. If your fridge said, “I’m terribly sorry, you cannot have that cold milk until I’ve rebooted myself and downloaded new drivers!” or your TV said, “You cannot watch the end of the cricket match because I am defragging my hard drive,” we would all go insane.” Bell’s Charter at Intel In Bell’s view, her charter at Intel is straightforward, “To provide insights and inspire innovation.” Her team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers is charged with setting research directions, leading new product strategy and defini- tion, and driving consumer-centric product innovation and thinking across the company. All this is everyday work for this wiry-haired woman who as a very small girl used to kill things—frogs and the like—growing up in an aboriginal community in Australia’s outback. Why is there a role like Bell’s at Intel today? “I joined Intel in 1998,” she recalls, “There was a col- lective sense in Intel’s senior management that they didn’t know what was going to happen when PCs became mass market. They knew they had market research, they knew they had the skills to size markets and how to survey people, and a little bit of usability work was going on even then, but I think the sense of what was missing was this notion about what was motivating people, what did they care about and was there an opportunity if you understood the things to drive new uses of technology.” “For many years thereafter, a part of every pres- entation I gave, every class I taught, every meeting I attended was explaining what an anthropologist was, what ethnography was, what was user centered design and why it was going to be a useful tool at Intel.” In her 13 years at Intel, Bell has fundamentally changed how the company envisions, plans, and develops its product platforms.
How Do Anthropology and Ethnography Work? Bell and her team spend their time hanging out wherever they can find users of technology— people on holiday, people in their workplace, people at home with their families in every corner of the planet. “At Intel, we try to start with people first— we ask questions about who they are and what they care about, we also ask questions about technology: What do you love about it, how does it frustrate you, what do you hate about it, what can’t you live without?” One of the key tools in the modern anthropologist’s toolkit is the digital camera. Says Bell, “We can now put digital cameras in the hands of our research par- ticipants. There is nothing like the film a five-year- old takes of its own home—you realize that electrical outlets are everywhere and furniture is really badly designed.” Seeing the world as it really is and though other people’s eyes is what anthropologists do that traditional market researchers often miss. What is Bell Learning about Generation X? One of the questions Bell and her team are sometimes asked is whether today’s Generation X—who seem to be digitally connected all the time—are somehow different from their parents’ generation. “I don’t think it’s as easy as we sometimes think,” says Bell. “We fall into the trap of assuming that what you are and what you do at 16 is what you will do for the rest of your life. I don’t know why we believe that because we were all 16 once, and we mostly don’t behave now as we did then.” In a study of early adopters of social networking technology, Bell spoke to a young woman who had just had a baby and was no longer blogging as much. “Have you ever tried to breast-feed a baby and use a laptop?” the woman asked. “It’s just not going to happen. It is much easier to go back to watching tele- vision. It doesn’t demand so much when I have this other thing I’m trying to do!” Can Bell’s Work Make a Difference? Bell, who brings to her craft a doctorate in anthropol- ogy from Stanford University, has become one of the world’s leading thinkers on the mash-up of human- ity and technology. She has worked tirelessly to get Intel chip designers to not simply build ever-faster chips and market them everywhere. The internet, in many parts of the world, means text on a cell phone, so Intel’s speedy but pricey Celeron chips are not very relevant in some markets. Intel’s cheaper and less power-hungry Atom chips are a better way to go. “Genevieve and her team make us engineers think dif- ferently,” says Stephen Pawlowski, who leads Intel’s chip architecture research team. “We intend to use Bell’s expertise heavily as we focus on emerging growth markets.” Perhaps if Bell has her way, one day we’ll all be using PCs that actually start when we ask them to start, and stop when we are done. Or if she fails in her quest, Apple will continue its inroads into the PC, smartphone, and other consumer electronics markets with its legendary skills at doing what Bell hopes Intel can do. And the rest of us will continue to be subservient to the products we buy, rather than masters of them. As Bell puts it, “Anthropology continues to be a really important way to bring voices into the technology realm that really need to be there. Ruth Benedict, an early anthropologist, had a great line— “The role of the anthropologist is to make the world safe for people.” Let’s hope people like Benedict and Bell prevail!
Intel is a pretty progessive company. By looking at how people use technology, Apple is another company that does this, you gain additional insights that you normally would not.
Questions
1. Can Bell's work make a difference?
2. What did her insight provide about Generation X?
3. What other companies use this type of research to launch new products?
When you answer your thre questions please use different articel news, review or any soruce to support your answer and please put a link under (www.) so I can make sure it wasn't copied and paste. Will leave a thumbs up!!
Explanation / Answer
Ans 1. Genevieve Bell Director User experiences at Intel believes that technology should be made considering how people would use it rather than just flooding the market with new technology which we think customers should use.
The work bell is doing can make a difference as follows:
Intel has already incorporated, developed and sold many of the ideas to big groups like jaguar land rover (for in-car technology interface, mobile manufacturers, laptop innovators, robot builders etc)
Ans 2. Her thoughts and understanding of generation X (age group 35-53 years old) are as follows:
Ans 3. The other companies, which use anthropology to launch new products, are as follows:
Many other companies who delve into human behavior, user experiences and track daily usage of customers include Samsung, Pharmaceutical companies etc. The idea is to understand customer behavior, innovate for future product development and manufacture according to the needs identified.
Reference:
“Technology, Intel sharp-eyed scientist.” The New York Times.
“ How an anthropologist help guides technology innovation at Intel.”
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