“All of these problems at the end of the day are human problems, I think that that’s one of the core insights that we try to apply to developing Facebook. What [people are] really interested in is
what’s going on with the people they care about. It’s all about giving
people the tools and controls that they need to be comfortable sharing
the information that they want. If you do that, you create a very
valuable service. It’s as much psychology and sociology as it is
technology.”
These are words of Mark Zuckerberg who studied psychology and computer science at Harvard University and went on to create Facebook whose initial IPO listed the company at a market cap of $104 billion.
Today there are many well-qualified
anthropologists working in business. Companies increasingly hire anthropologists to
design new technology, to learn more about their customers, and to improve
their business. Increasingly, business anthropology is a preferred approach
for business executives to understand why and how people around them do what they do, as well as why and how
consumers choose to purchase the goods and services that they prefer.
Companies hire anthropologists to measure how customers like their
products and what they can do to improve them. Companies like
social gaming developer Zynga and web search company Yahoo hire people with anthropology degrees
to do user research. These anthropologists use anthropological
methods to collect information from game users and analyze it to help
game designers make the games more attractive and fun for users.
Intel is another company that has hired anthropologists. In
particular, Director of Interaction and Experience Research, Genevieve
Bell, is credited with changing Intel’s business plan.
She has done research on the way people all over the world use
computers and the internet and has helped redirect Intel into the smart
phone and internet TV markets, both of which are non-computer-based ways of using the
internet. She says that for large parts of the
world, the Internet is, and will continue to be, mostly text on a phone. 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.
Other tech companies have social scientists on staff. Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard
are some of the corporations that have anthropologists and ethnologists
working alongside systems engineers and software developers.
Xerox is credited with pioneering this practice when its Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center in 1970s hired an anthropology grad student to help engineers
build copiers with an easy-to-grasp user interface. This easy-to-grasp user interface was then adopted by Steve Jobs to create the Apple computer which revolutionized the PC industry.
