She doesn't like tech, but how we use it
By DAVE GUSSOW
Published July 25, 2005
HILLSBORO, Ore. - Genevieve Bell is not someone you would expect to find working for the world's largest computer chip company. Bell is a cultural anthropologist.
"For me as a researcher, technology in and of itself is really boring," Bell said. "I'm not inspired by it. I'm inspired by what people do with it."
And that is why Intel has assigned Bell, an Australian whose mother was an anthropologist, too, to study the digital home. To her, that means emphasizing the "home" first - digging into people's everyday habits, likes, dislikes, interests, how they live, just about anything they do.
The data Bell and her team gather then can go to people such as Herman D'Hooge, an innovation strategist whose team brainstorms how technology can evolve into products to meet the "digital" part.
"The challenge for any technology company in this country is that we're seduced by our own product," Bell said. Too often companies forget that those in the industry are "never our own end users."
Indeed, she even questions how the industry traditionally designs gadgets for the so-called early adopters, people who buy cutting-edge technology early and often. If the early adopters like it, the mass market follows, or so the industry has thought.
But what if, Bell wonders, the industry instead designed products for the majority, those who don't rush out to buy the latest thing?
Bell, 37, received her doctorate from Stanford and has worked for Intel for seven years. In a recent conversation at Intel's research facility, Bell touched on a number of issues about how different countries use and perceive technology, including simplicity.
Among her observations:
Rapid technological change is not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, the World War II generation and older baby boomers have been through everything from mass adoption of phones and television to the space race to VCRs and answering machines.
"People have learned to use complicated things in the past, if the value was there," Bell said.
Older consumers are often an overlooked market. "There's a certain kind of arrogance in the technology industry that many of those people don't know how to deal with new technology," she said.
It is not a good strategy to perpetuate the idea that as long as young people "get" technology, then it's okay.
"Simplicity shouldn't just mean making something more simple. It's about making it do the right thing. It's about making it do a thing beautifully, flawlessly, repeatedly, first time out of the box to every time thereafter."
While Americans consider checking e-mail and surfing the Internet wirelessly in coffee shops, airports and hotels an ordinary activity, not everyone does.
A stranger in Australia walked up to Bell and chewed her out, expletives included, because she used a wireless network to check her e-mail - in a public place.
"I was implying by that activity that I was so invaluable my office couldn't live without me, that I was so important I needed to be online right at that moment when what I should have been doing is having a beer and enjoying the sunshine," Bell said. "I was implying I was better than everybody else."
In Malaysia, Muslims use cell phones to remind them that it's prayer time, technology "being used to support a set of cultural practices that are 1,700 years old."
The most popular Web site in India is for arranged marriages.
The Chinese are creating elaborate virtual funerals and memorials for their ancestors because they can't build lineage halls.
"In a way, that again (goes against) this notion that technology is all about progress and forward motion and change," Bell said.
In Singapore, nannies are being trained as network and information technology support, in addition to their cooking, cleaning and child-care chores.
"It's suddenly become domestic women's work," Bell said, "a culture that could be understood as a kind of drudgery task."
In Britain, a third of 16- and 17-year-olds have abandoned the Internet because it "is so 1990s."
In Italy, it's cool and popular for some teens to turn off their cell phones.
Other countries have made initiatives out of technological goals, such as India saying the Internet is the future, Korea's desire to be a ubiquitous computing society by 2010 and Australia's wish to have a computer in every home.
The last big national technological challenge for Americans that came from the government? Maybe President John F. Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon in the 1960s.
"You have government (elsewhere) making these highly aspirational statements that link forms of citizenship to technology ownership," she said. In the United States, "technology consumption isn't related to good citizenship in that sense."
And, finally, some things baffle even the experts.
"I recently purchased shampoo and conditioner," Bell said. "And it came with an instructional DVD."
- Dave Gussow can be reached at 727 771-4328 or gussow@sptimes.com