Bell's official title at Intel is director of interaction and experience research. Simply put, she's the "right brain" in a sea of scientists and engineers. Her mission: to help the chipmaker power new devices, make new software, and enter new markets by providing its technologists with a better understanding of how people all over the world use computers, phones, and other gadgets.
Indeed, Bell, who has a doctorate in cultural anthropology, fought hard to get chip designers to rethink their impulse to build ever-faster processors and market them outside the U.S. For great swaths of the world the Internet is, and will continue to be, mostly text on a phone, she says. And so Intel is pursuing that market with its Atom chips, which are cheaper and consume less power than, say, Intel Core i3 or Celeron processors. Bell has also been key in helping Intel move into the smart-TV market, studying how people behave when they are entertained by television in a living room, and how that experience is distinct from sitting in front of a computer.
She recounts meeting a Muslim boy in Kuala Lumpur who used his phone to orient him toward Mecca for prayer. She relates the story of coming across a ceremonial store in a city in Malaysia that had paper facsimiles of the latest cellphones. The paper models were burned so that dead relatives could talk to each other in the afterlife. "Technology is starting to manifest itself in every part of our lives," Bell says. "Not just at work and home but in religious practices, our love lives, and how we keep our secrets."
She spends most of her time in homes and other social centers all over the world, just hanging out with people living their daily lives. Bell has emerged as one of the world's foremost thinkers on the intersection of technology and humanity. "As an anthropologist, I couldn't have picked anything more fertile," she declares. "But let me be clear: I don't believe that technology changes us; we choose to be changed by it.
Intel's ultimate task is to enable technologies that are intimately connected to our lives. It is that "stickiness" that makes Apple products so adored, or explains why BlackBerry devices are addictive. But for all her talk of connectedness and serving the emerging world, Bell remains very much a killer: "If you do it right, if you make the thing in such a way that people love it, it will be part of everything," Bell says. "It sounds macabre, but it has to be so important that you bury people with it."
