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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
We're All Cyberlab Rats
Anthropologists have deserted the bush to study modern techno-man and how he's adapting to a world of wild gadgets
By MICHELLE LEVANDER Hong Kong
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Anthropologist Genevieve Bell studies the most intimate details of people's lives. She knows that northern Italians like to read newspapers in bed and that Chinese families don't spend much time in their small, cramped kitchens. She might trail along when a housewife in Brittany visits the produce market at dawn and is ready with her notebook as a German family heads off to a country cottage, lugging along the dog, the kids and, increasingly these days, a VCR. She is probably one of the few people who can tell you the symbolism behind people's choice of location for their TV sets in Beijing or Bombay.
She's not just being nosy. Bell works for Intel's People and Practices group, where she tries to figure out how people use the devices that have insinuated their way into our lives—from the polenta maker popular in Italy to the cell phone in Japan. These observations—about how we goof off as well as how we toil—influence how technology companies gamble on the future. "Tell me what you did yesterday," she says when we meet in Hong Kong. "When you get up, what are you doing? Turning on the TV, logging on?"
Corporations have relied on social scientists to observe people at work since the turn of the last century, when Frederick Taylor visited the Ford assembly line, stopwatch in hand, to time each turn of the screw. Efficiency was initially the mantra, but when anthropologists entered the scene they shifted the focus from counting keystrokes to understanding how people incorporate technology into their work lives. These days, as technology seeps into our daily routines, corporate anthropologists are tagging along while their subjects—cubicle drones rather than Maori hunters—leave the office and head for home. "People are intuitively innovative in ways that computer designers never anticipated," says John Seely Brown, chief scientist at Xerox, who raised eyebrows in the 1980s when he brought anthropologists to the company's research center in Palo Alto, California. "You need to understand the collective intelligence."
When anthropologists first arrived at Xerox PARC, their appearance in the hallway elicited catcalls. But their unconventional approach led to groundbreaking insights into how work is done. It was over casual morning coffees that copier technicians exchanged their most valuable information, learning from one another. This realization prompted Xerox to rethink its training model so that it could include the insights learned from the bottom up.
Today anthropologists are flexing their clout industrywide. At IBM, engineers are required to stand behind glass mirrors and watch ordinary people try to use their software. "It's like torture for the engineers," says Dan Russell, who heads a usability research lab at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. "They'll be saying, 'Wait. Nooooo! Just press the button, dummy.'" As Intel begins to design consumer products—like set-top boxes—as well as chips, it wants to extend the "critical experience" of the PC to everything from the television to the fridge. To do so, anthropologists are studying how different cultures use these appliances. In America the refrigerator has become an informal bulletin board, prompting appliance makers to design models that have flat-panel Web tablets the whole family can use to keep track of activities. Bell, however, already knows the product won't sell in China: families never gather in their tiny kitchens, and Beijing's one-child policy means parents always know what their precious child is doing anyway. "It is really important to start thinking about the home as its own design space," Bell says, "as a place that has its own requirements and rituals. Imagine if the PC had been developed for the home first. Perhaps it would be made of plastic that you could take apart and put in the dishwasher when it got grubby."
In an age of information overload, anthropologists are also weighing the impact of the next technology upgrade. Will users' lives improve, for example, if they lug around yet another nifty handheld device? Studies show that a person can handle only so many interruptions, from e-mail, phones and co-workers, without falling apart. "The human species hasn't had a major network upgrade in a mega-year," says IBM's Russell. "There are some really hard limits." Techno-innovation may move at a relentless pace, but the human attention span can still run out of bandwidth.
Related Sites
Genevieve Bell
John Seely Brown
IBM's Almaden Research Center
IBM's BlueEyes Project
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