anthropology

Daniela Cerqui is a social and cultural anthropologist involved in the study of the relationship between technology and society and, more fundamentally, humankind. Her research focuses on the ethical and social aspects of the convergent robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

Daniela is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne. She is also a researcher at the Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading, UK, where Lift08 speaker Kevin Warwick became (in 2002) the first human with a chip implanted in his body and linked directly to his nervous system.

Since 2004 Daniela Cerqui has been closely following Kevin in his activities, exploring his main values and the promotion of cyborg culture. Daniela’s mission is to make Kevin Warwick aware of the main social, ethical, philosophical and anthropological issues related to his work. See this World News video to find out more about Daniela's research on Cyborg Anthropology.

And don’t miss the great video of Kevin Warwick’s talk at Lift08, about implant technology enhancing human abilities! One of our all-time Lift favorites.

Jan Chipchase is a researcher for Nokia Design. He details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions, trends he identified through the extensive field work he and his team are conducting around the world. Jan's work shows how the digital devices are creating new practices and usages by becoming smaller and smaller, opening up a new design space for the mobile industry.

One of the presentations at LIFT08 that hit me the most was this presentation by Younghee Jung at Nokia about Nokia Open Studio. The great thing about the outcomes of her project were that you could really see local culture reflected in the designs that were posted by local communities. Local challenges like weather, criminality or lack of money found their way in design features of the phones.

This keynote offered me great insight in the importance of getting in touch with communities. From a crowdsourcing perspective I am highly interested in what the implications would be when taking this online. Culture on the internet might be not that diversified as the cases in Open Studio, but when approaching communities online, culture will definitely be important.

Thanks to Younghee and many others who really LIFTed me. I am gratefully whirling down again, looking back at a great experience.

Why we invited Genevieve to LIFT
Genevieve Bell is Ethnographer, Senior Engineer and Director of User Experiences at Intel. We are interested in the fact that Genevieve's profile and her work are very original for a technological company such as Intel.

What will Genevieve talk about
Genevieve will present us with her understanding of user experience of technology and product shaping insights into consumers world-wide. She will tell us from her experience in bringing a research driven, end-user focus to Intel.

Official biography
Genevieve Bell grew up in Australia, moving between the working class suburbs of Melbourne and Canberra and the Aboriginal communities of Central and Northern Australia. She has a PhD in anthropology and works as Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group. There she manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers.
Learn more about Genevieve's groundbreaking work on her LIFT profile .