She Wants to Watch You

 
Consumer-goods makers are getting up close and personal, peering into people's lives to make the devices of the future more user-friendly.

YOU CALL THIS WORK? Going furniture-shopping in Beijing. Watching television in a living room in Mumbai. Grilling bratwurst by a lake in Bavaria.

That's what Australian Genevieve Bell does for a living. As an anthropologist working for United States-based chipmaker Intel, she studies "the minutiae of daily life" in hopes of making technology more approachable, and even fun, for consumers all over the world. She goes home with people, follows them to the market, joins their weekend excursions.

Companies who design everything from household appliances to personal digital assistants are taking a closer look at how people really live. Finally, it seems, they have realized it's futile to invent technology and then try to convince consumers they need it. Intel, which helps other manufacturers design goods that run on its Pentium processors, has a team of anthropologists and psychologists who study human behaviour. Their research helps the company understand the "needs that traditional market research cannot [convey]," says Christine Riley, manager of Intel's people and practices research group.

Asian companies have been slow to catch on, but they could benefit from ethnographic research, or observing people in their natural settings. Piyush Singh, managing director in Singapore for research company IDC, says focus groups do not work well in this part of the world. He says Asians are reluctant to express their unvarnished opinions and refrain from disagreeing in a group or openly criticizing a company's products.

Probing the mysteries of people's behaviour has been a life-long experience for 34-year-old Bell. The daughter of an Australian cultural anthropologist, she spent part of her childhood in an Aboriginal community in central Australia, where her mother was studying the religious practices of the women.

An enthusiastic, articulate woman with flamboyant red hair, Bell enjoys examining the tiniest details of consumers' lives in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Working with local anthropologists in the countries she visits, she goes into the homes of willing subjects and pries into their daily routines. Beijing residents were astonished at the scope of her curiosity: "I want to know when did you get up? What did you do? Did you turn on the television, or the radio, or read a newspaper? What did you eat? Where did it come from? Who prepared it? Where did you eat it in the house? What did you do then? Did you go to the office? What did you take with you? How long were you there." And on and on until bedtime.

Bell spends anywhere from 2.5 to 18 hours with her subjects, studying the arrangement of their kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, taking thousands of photos, filming hours of videotape

"There's a really interesting disjuncture between what people tell you they are doing and what they are actually doing when you follow them home," says Bell. "They tell you they never watch TV, and their kids are in the next room watching TV."

Sometimes people simply don't track their own daily routines and can't recap them for a traditional market researcher. U.S. plumbing-fixture maker Moen Inc. uncovered safety risks when it videotaped consumers in the shower--with their permission, of course. American women, for example, were in the habit of holding on to the temperature control of one shower unit with their free hand while shaving their legs--a detail that likely never would have emerged from interviews. The company redesigned the unit to prevent scalding accidents.

MAKE IT HOMELY
As Asia becomes increasingly important to American tech companies, Bell has been spending more time in China and India examining an increasingly wired middle class. Bell's observations have helped Intel "see how international markets differ from the USA, even when the potential customers are technology zealots," says Riley. Bell is heading a two-year research project in Asia looking at "the lifestyles, aspirations and needs of the emerging consumer populations" in the region.

So far, Bell has found that in China, for example, the kitchen is a tiny, functional place, unlike in the U.S. or Italy, where the kitchen is often the heart of a home. In middle-class homes in China, living rooms are important entertainment centres designed to impress visitors. Sofas and chairs are arranged around a huge TV, giant speakers and a video or DVD player. In India, by contrast, people have smaller TVs, and often several sets, but they are seldom the focal point of a room.

This research is vital to Intel when designing products for the Asia market. Bell's input is evident in two Intel children's products just on the market in Asia--personal-computer accessories called the Sound Morpher, a sound-mixing toy, and the QX3 Computer Microscope. She told the company what any parent might know--that 8- to 14-year-olds are hands-on and tend to bang toys around. So the microscope, although connected to a PC, can be taken out of its stand and shared with friends. "You could have done all these same things with a piece of software, and it wouldn't be nearly as powerful," Bell says.

Her goal is to convince product designers to make products for the home, and not simply consider the home a more casual version of the office, where the aim is to accomplish a list of tasks in the most efficient way.

"The home is not a task space," she says. "It's a place where people spend their lives. It's about emotions, relationships, well-being, family, annoyance, fights, disputes and messiness. Let's not take products from the office and bring them home.

"If you listen carefully enough, you can really make products that make people happy." Technology that makes people happy, not just more efficient. Now there's a concept.

By Kitty McKinsey / HONG KONG
Far Eastern Economic Review - September 06, 2001