Culture Matters: An Interview with Genevieve Bell

By Kelly Goto and Subha Subramanian

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.

Can you describe the experiences that led you to a career in cultural anthropology at Intel?

I joined Intel 6 years ago. I had just finished my PhD at Stanford and I hoped to be teaching at a small liberal arts college somewhere. Doing anthropology in an industry context wasn't the career I expected at all. But, like all good stories and adventures, I met this man in a bar in Silicon Valley who ran a small IT start-up. I mentioned to him that I was an anthropologist. He tracked me down the next day and offered me a job. At first, I declined. I had a tough time understanding what an anthropologist could do in the technology field. But I started thinking about applying my field in an entirely new way. When I started at Intel, I was lucky enough to join a team of like-minded social scientists who had been working for a number of years to get Intel to take its end-users seriously - to really think about the people who used their technology. Part of the challenge was educating people on the value of what cultural anthropologists do. But we said things that resonated. And over the last few years, it has been interesting to see what anthropology can do, not only for Intel, but for the technology industry as a whole.

How does cultural anthropology help you debunk popular misconceptions?

The current conventional wisdom, in the US at least, is that the United States is the technology center of the world. Americans think the way things are done here is the right way. There is the notion that other countries and cultures are just playing catch-up - sometimes leap-frogging particular technologies, but always developing along a trajectory set here about the right ideas and products. It is refreshing to have American engineers return from Japan or China or India and say, "Oh my God! You will not believe what I saw." It is also a shock for people in other markets to realize they are more sophisticated than the markets in the US.

How do cultural differences affect the design of technology? Can you give us some specific examples?

There are lots of cultures in Asia, where the idea of the 'individual' is often trumped by other forms of personhood - where people think more about themselves as members of families and households, than they do as self-defining individuals. This has interesting implications on the notion of technology ownership. In Indonesia, for instance, rather than individually owned cell phones, I met at least one family, where they share all their phones. You take whatever phone is charged and has money on it - individual numbers do not link to individuals but rather to whole households. The connection is between social networks rather than individuals. It truly challenges ideas of how we communicate. Here in the US, I may use a cell phone to coordinate with someone about a specific meeting place and when I call them, I expect that individual to answer. It is about efficiency and individualism. In Indonesia, it is more of a communication between social nodes or networks, where anyone in that family or household will know all that should be communicated beyond the network, so at one level, it makes no difference whom you call, you will get the 'same story'.

Another example is a wireless router designed for home use. For the most part these routers are designed with a generic house-hold footprint in mind. The only problem is that a generic house turns out to be the American one - approximately 1800-2200 square feet. However, if you put that same device in an apartment complex in Singapore where people live primarily in high rise, multi-family complexes with living space of 500 to 600 square feet - who knows where your I-Tune might be playing or where your document may be printing. It is a challenge to many of those in American companies to realize the concept of 'home' varies from culture to culture. We think of the home, family, office, work and leisure as stable concepts. Not so. The "home" is different in different places. Ideas of work are different; ideas of family are different. Our understanding of how the world works is ingrained in our thinking. The challenge is to not reproduce notions of how we think the world looks. This is part of what anthropology offers to the field of technology.

In the USA, we tend to imagine that the best technology is technology that changes society and the way we do things, completely. Fortunately, this cultural burden is not always attached to technology in other cultural traditions. There are many instances of technology supporting religious activities, rather than ideas about efficiency or cultural change and 'progress.' The lunar almanac - traditionally hung on the wall between the dining and kitchen area - is one of the services that you can get on your phone in China. In Malaysia, you can use your phone to find Mecca - the phone is a religious and spiritual tool that connects people to a set of religious practices that are more than 1600 years old - hardly technology inventing a new set of social or cultural practices.

What does cultural anthropology offer Intel in terms of research that affects the design of products?

I think one of our big successes as a team has been to shift the company's thinking. Intel now understands that technology will not be consumed in other places in the world as it is has been in the U.S.A. There is some understanding here that culture plays an important role in shaping people's relationships to new technologies. I think we have been responsible, along with others, for complicating their thinking about things like 'the home', 'business' and 'mobility'. We tend to think about these things as constellations of cultural practices, rather than technology solutions and that perspective, while challenging, has been increasingly seen as a helpful one here at Intel.

Of course, we have worked closely with various business groups too, helping infuse some of our understanding of daily life into their larger questions about how to build better technology platforms. Recently, we worked with a team of interaction designers and usability engineers in the Desktop Platform Group to help create a new technology platform for the Chinese market. This PC offers a new form factor and a different interface model to really respond to the different ways in which educational processes take place in China.

Indeed, thinking about cultural practices shaping technology usage means thinking about things like interfaces and interactions. After all even something as straightforward as the 'desktop' actually implies a whole way of making sense of the world that is quite Western - desktop, recycling trash can, inbox, folders and mail are all concepts that come out of a particular notion of work, and organizational infrastructure that might not be as transparent as we imagine. Similarly, ideas about privacy and security, things we tend to imagine as universal concerns, may in fact be slightly more unstable cultural constructs that play out differently in different cultural contexts. And sometimes there are local or indigenous categories of cultural practice or importance that are hard to imagine fitting into current technology road-maps. In some cultures, the home is seen to embody values like simplicity, modesty, grace and humility - what technologies embody these values? How does a user interface look that embodies harmony or balance? While I don't know the answers, it is very interesting to think about possible design approaches that incorporate different values of technology.

Is there anything that stands out in common from your studies all over the world?

Two things stand out:
1) We underestimate the role of women as consumers and users of technology in the home. Even in cultures where women are not the principle users of technology within the home, they are its most frequent gate-keepers, monitoring and policing their own family's usage patterns.
2) We tend to generalize from our own experiences and desires out to the rest of the world. As such, we are ill equipped to see different usage models as anything other than exotic and temporary. For instance, as US-based technologists, we do a very poor job of understanding the ways in which religion affects how people see the world and perceive time, space, local landscapes, etc., and in turn, how that affects their use of technology.

What advice do you have for others who want to follow in your footsteps?

Well, aside from the usual advice about going to graduate school, finding the right enterprise and project, I guess I have 5 pieces of relatively straight-forward advice for anyone trying to do ethnography in corporate settings:
1) Go to other places. You cannot really get a sense of another's cultural practices without going to where it is happening - you have to get out of your office, out of your own comfort zone, away.
2) Be there. It isn't just enough to go to a place, you have to genuinely be there, to participate and pay attention. Wherever possible, you should spend time with local people doing the things that are important to them.
3) Prepare to be surprised. Being surprised, for me at least, is always a nice indicator that I am challenging my own assumptions about what I think is going on. You need to be willing to be wrong and blown away by what people are doing. Letting go of your own sense of how things should work and why is a big challenge but a worthwhile one.
4) Prepare to be vulnerable. When you ask questions, you need to be prepared to answer questions as well - there is a form of reciprocity at work that is important to attend to. It is a quid pro quo.
5) Be prepared to be truthful to what you are doing. It is important that when you summarize work from your field studies, you do so accurately and honestly. Resist the temptation to make it simple, as it rarely is!

How do internal teams interpret your findings?

They look at me like I am nuts. (Laughs.) Well, actually, these days, there is less of that. The business team looks at our findings as an opportunity. The lab team looks at our findings as an interesting challenge -- to understand how concepts such as leisure, solitude and meditation differ all over the world in large and small ways. By and large, though, people listen when we talk.