Genevieve Bell profile, WIRED magazine

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

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Genevieve Bell.
Director, Interaction & Experience Research, INTEL CORP.

For the past six months, Genevieve Bell has been sweet-talking Australians, Malays and Singaporeans into turning out the contents of their cars. “We lay tarpaulins on the street and empty their cars of everything we can find from the glove compartment, in between the seats, the door pockets, the boot, the whole nine yards, and talk to people about what they’re carrying around with them every day of their lives,” says the 43-year-old ‘Intel Fellow’, one of the company’s elite group of global technical leaders.

“This project is all about the places where people consume technology, the ways in which technologies layer on top of one another and the way we use competing technologies.

"We found, for example, that people are buying cars fitted with GPS, but they’re also using their mobile devices for GPS, as well as keeping maps handy too. One of the things I’m fascinated in is as cars become smarter, as they get more technology in them, what are the consequences going to be?”

An anthropologist by training, Bell describes the research as “intensely speculative”. It will not, she says, lead directly onto to new Intel technology anytime soon.

As leader of a new R&D laboratory consisting of social scientists, interaction designers, tech researchers and human factors engineers (who measure products’ usability), the fast-talking Oregon-based Australian is simply charged with looking “7-10 years out from now”. Not so much blue skies thinking, as asking what lies beyond the blue?

Her mission is to imbue Intel with a Steve Jobs-like sense of anticipation of consumer desire.

“My job is to spend time in people’s homes and lives, making sense of what they value and using that to help Intel understand what technology they should make,” she explains. “It’s about looking far enough ahead so there’s a runway to do some interesting things, and close enough so you don’t find yourself talking the language of science fiction.”

(Start, WIRED magazine, August 2011 edition)

Posted by James Silver - On Tuesday, June 07, 2011

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