Anthropologist goes from iguanas to Intel

Streaming video to wireless screens dotted all over the house might seem like a cracking idea in Silicon Valley, but how about in a two-room Beijing apartment where six people share the only TV every night?

Or how about the small Indian business that hires someone just to sit in the back room and hit "connect" every time the shaky server drops offline. Write a software program to replace him? Well, not if he's your cousin and you don't want to put him out of a job.

Issues like these received scant attention at U.S. tech companies until a few years ago, when vendors started to realize that their notion of the "digital home" -- or the digital office, for that matter -- might not be the same as everyone else's. And that growing profits and reducing headcount don't equal progress everywhere in the world.

Enter Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel whose job it is to travel the world and live among different peoples to figure out what they actually want from technology, instead of what Intel thinks they want. She reports back to the company and stops it from pursuing daft ideas like trying to create the paperless office, which a good anthropologist could have told you 10 years ago is never going to happen. People like paper, Bell said in an interview this week. "It's what anthropologists call a persistent and stubborn artifact."

Her life has been richer than most, if not everyone's idea of fun. Born in Sydney and raised in Melbourne, she left her modern surroundings when she was about 6 years old after her mother, recently separated, earned a Ph.D. in anthropology and moved to the central Australian outback to study aboriginal peoples. Bell spent the next eight years living among aborigines, including a community of about 600 near Alice Springs.

"I dropped out of school, stopped wearing shoes and went hunting with people every chance I got," she said. Dinner often included witchetty grubs, a type of caterpillar that lives among tree roots, and iguana (which tastes like fish, apparently, not chicken). "I was very fortunate. I had the most blessed childhood," she said.

At 19 she earned a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She landed at Newark Airport in New Jersey, alone and with no idea where she was. She stayed at Bryn Mawr long enough to get a Master's degree, and, like her mother, eventually earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, from California's Stanford University.

That's where the Intel thing started. In 1998 she was in a Silicon Valley bar with a friend who was being chatted up by an attractive stockbroker, she said. Being a dutiful companion, Bell made small talk with his friend, a local entrepreneur, to keep him amused. The entrepreneur asked lots of questions and decided that Bell could be making a pile of cash plying her trade for local technology companies.

Six months later, at 31, she was hired by Intel, along with a second anthropologist. They hosted lunch meetings and tried to convince engineers that not every application of technology is a marvel just because it can be done. It was slow going at first. "I think they just thought we were good for a laugh," she says. "We had a lot of stories to tell."