Being Human in a Digital World | Odgis + Co

Who is Genevieve Bell?

As an anthropologist and researcher, Genevieve Bell is an expert in understanding the intersection of people and technology. According to Genevieve, one thing hasn’t changed about human beings in spite of rapid changes in technology: we love a good story.

As Genevieve explains, delighting people boils down to five core characteristics that we must consider when creating experiences:

1. People need friends and family.
2. People want to belong to a community.
3. People need meaning in their lives.
4. People need objects to talk about who they are.
5. People need to keep secrets and lies.

Additionally, people have five core things we worry about:

1. Our reputation
2. We need to be bored and we need to be surprised
3. We want to be different
4. We want to feel time
5. We want to be forgotten (so we can reinvent ourselves)

Genevieve Bell is a vice president and Intel Fellow and the director of User Experience Research in the Intel Labs organization at Intel Corporation. She leads a team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers and computer scientists focused on people’s needs and desires to help shape new Intel products and technologies.

An accomplished anthropologist and researcher, Bell joined Intel in 1998. She has been granted a number of patents for consumer electronics innovations throughout her career, with additional patents in the user experience space pending, and is the author of numerous journal papers and articles. She was named an Intel Fellow in 2008.

In addition to her position at Intel, Bell is a highly regarded industry expert and frequent commentator on the intersection of culture and technology. She has been featured in publications such as Wired, Forbes, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She is also a sought-after public speaker and panelist at technology conferences worldwide for the insights she has gained from extensive international field work and research.