One of Intel’s anthropologists, Genevieve Bell, gave the keynote speech at the Australasian Computer Science Conference last year. After the conference, she was asked if it would be fair to characterize her job as reminding American technology experts that all Internet users aren’t Americans. Her frank reply:

“[T]hat’s certainly one way of thinking about it. . . . One of the jobs for most anthropologists is to tell stories of the people we spend time with, and to really do justice to their aspirations and desires and frustrations by telling their stories back to other people who wouldn’t listen to them otherwise. Often that means yes, I am talking to Americans about the rest of the world . . . .”

The question was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless worth asking. U.S. companies frequently set the standards for technology used all over the world, but they sometimes (often?) fail to take into account socioeconomic differences beyond simply translating the project into another language. Bell gives the example of the phone system in Ghana where many people, fearful of large phone charges, rarely complete a call and instead make an agreement in advance to ring once and hang up (a practice known as “flashing” or “peeping” which was also once common even in the U.S.)

Engineers also can build much more useful tools by taking the time to learn about the lives of users. By doing so, the tools enhance rather than hinder the users’ lifestyles. For example, Bell explains that in Malaysia, Indonesia and much of the middle east, mobile phones have become an important part of religious ritual by incorporating software that allows you to orient the phone towards Mecca and remind the user when to pray.

Read the full article here.