PC Magazine just published a long feature story on how anthropology is moving into the corporation.

Product development has historically been predicated on a “build it and they will come” basis. But times are changing, consumer choice is increasing and the game plan has evolved.

Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, uses a variety of research methods to study people in a bid to understand human culture. Since top companies across several industries are treating ethnography as a means of designing for and connecting with potential customers, technology companies have recently begun investing significantly more research time and money into the field. At chip giant Intel, for example, the company spent approximately $5 billion on ethnographic research and development during 2004.

As the respective leaders in the hardware and operating systems markets, both Intel and fellow tech giant Microsoft have begun using teams of researchers to identify new market opportunities and improve existing products.

Read full story

“While computer companies spruik the digital home, Intel researcher Genevieve Bell has an eye out for the next big thing”, writes David Flynn in the Australian newspaper The Age.

“As the head of Intel’s user experience group in the US, and the company’s anthropologist, Ms Bell’s mission is to add the vital human element to technology.”

“It’s not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it’s going to be useful. You have to create stuff that people really want, rather than create stuff just because you can,” she says.

“Bell’s work has already started to deliver results,” writes Flynn. “Intel recently completed a pilot program in rural India where a single “community PC” provides internet access to entire villages.”

Read full story

(via UPA monthly)

In a story in Pakistan’s Daily Times, Bill Siu (whom I presume to be an Intel Vice-President), shares some of the insights gained from Intel’s ethnographic research in Asia.

The Inside Asia project team, led by Dr Genevieve Bell [which is part of the People and Practices Research Team of Intel] spent two years conducting ethnographic research among 100 households in seven Asian countries, including India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Australia.

The article then continues with a focus on such uniquely Asian issues such as the emphasis on community, the sharing of technology, the difficulty of accessing electrical power in rural regions, the technological infrastructural delivery in cities (to buildings, rather than to apartments), the religious and spiritual resistance to the Western concept of being ‘always on’, and Asia’s fairly large internet cafés with up to 50 PC’s.

Intel has already begun to translate the findings of the field research conducted in Asia into new technology products and has introduced two innovations for Chinese consumers: the China Home Learning PC and the iCafé platform.

The China Home Learning PC supports educational experiences and development through a unique combination of hard-key switching between “educational” and “general” mode and a novel use of touch screens and voicematching to coach children in Mandarin and English.

Intel’s iCafé platform is a major new computing platform customized for the nearly 200,000 Internet cafes (or “iCafés”) in China, where people socialize, send e-mail, watch movies, and play online games. Intel’s new platform technology is expected to transform the way iCafés do business.

The writer suggests that more is to come. Because the PC as we know it was built from the ground up with a Western set of values and constraints, how might a PC look if it were built from the ground up in Malaysia or India or Kenya or Egypt?

- Read full story (Pakistan Daily Times)
- A longer version of the same article can also be found on the Intel web site

In a 30 minute dicussion with six guests, BBC Radio 4 delves into the topic of anthropologists who no longer observe tribal people out in the jungle, but watch us instead. This approach is meant to give busy executives an insight into the real world that people like us inhabit. But, they wonder, does it really work or is it another passing fad in the world of marketing, like the focus groups many people think it’s replacing?

Guests are Dr Simon Roberts of Ideas Bazaar, Paul Eden of Ogilvy and Mather, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Professor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School, Professor Richard Harper of Microsoft, and Paco Underhill of Envirosell.

Listen to the programme (RealPlayer)
Programme web page

(via Usability Views)

Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel, has fundamentally changed the way we think about design, technology and culture. Through research and observation, Bell brought to our awareness how concepts of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘individual’ vary from one culture to another. Bell’s research has taken her to India, Indonesia, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea and Australia. For example, in Indonesia, Bell observed people using their cellular phones to locate Mecca so they could pray. Many of her findings challenge western assumptions about how people use technology around the world.

Read interview