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Brinda Dalal on the Internet of Things
Brinda Dalal joined our team as a research director in early 2012. Her career to-date has spanned two decades and three continents. Brinda's research has taken her to India, where she co-developed micro-credit and housing programs with local women, and to Japan, where she explored high-tech innovation. She’s worked for Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, co-founding their clean technology initiative and helping to inspire the invention of toner-less printing and erasable paper—which won top environmental innovation awards from Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal in the process.
Brinda’s relationship with IFTF began in the early 2000s; she participated on IFTF panels on ethnographic expertise in the corporate sector, and on micro credit and collective action for citizen groups in low-resource settings. In 2011, she conducted ethnographic research in Asia and the U.S. for the Health Horizons program.
We recently sat down with Brinda to discuss the wealth of insight and experience she brings to our program:
Q: You have a background in anthropology, which is sometimes considered a soft science, but you’ve worked extensively in Silicon Valley. How have you used anthropology as a technology researcher?
A: What you learn in anthropology, is how to systematically break down your assumptions to form much more complex, nuanced views of societal changes. You learn how not to take a person’s statements at face value, or be constrained to your own limited knowledge or point-of-view, but instead explore, deepen and expand your understanding of commonly used phrases, assumptions, and behaviors. You also examine how prevalent certain practices or perceptions are, and explore the variations. That discipline of gaining clarity and deepening your understanding of say, what people wish to do with technology and why, is invaluable in high-tech and emerging markets, especially when you are designing products.
I’ve been influenced by studies in material culture and the notion that the objects that people create and have around them reveal who people are. Objects are almost like an index to what matters to people, and their relationships with each other.
Q: And what does technology say about us? What would be an example of something integrating cultural insights into technology studies has revealed?
A: I’ve done several studies on mobile phone use in the last
decade, and it’s fascinating in the age of smartphones, to see how
people use low-fidelity techniques to share their day-to-day experiences with others. One person was on a beach and held up his mobile phone in the air so that the person he was calling could also enjoy the dramatic sound of the surf. Another took vivid close-ups of wildflowers growing on the doorstep. Each day, he sent a new batch of images to a friend who was on an assignment overseas. What struck us was how important it is for people to share these little flashes of intense experiences with friends and family far away. These are delicious insights for technology designers, who are constantly hunting for new ways to have their device remain an integral part of people’s lives.
Q: An do you think purely a high-tech-oriented behavior, or something more general?
A: Let me give you an example beyond Silicon Valley. Back in
the 1990s, I was doing fieldwork for my dissertation and lived with nomadic pastoralists in the Himalayas. The families built small
homesteads in the forest and herded water buffalo. They made a living by selling and trading fresh milk and butter. In the summer when it got hot and the rivers dried up, most of the family took the herd to high mountain pastures where the animals could feed on the spring grass, and a few relatives would stay in the plains to look after their huts. So families might be separated for several months at a time. I used to visit their mountain camps, and found that people loved to grab my tape recorder to record their songs. They spent hours recording. Then they would instruct me to go and stay with their grandfather or an aunt or sister in the plains, and play these songs to them. So their use of technology, and the imprint of their voices and emotions in those recordings, became a form of asynchronous communication across space. It was also like a personal calling card to convey that their relatives could trust a stranger.
Q: This year Health Horizons is going to be researching “big data” and “information ecosystems.” How do think these experiences are going to shape your approach to this year’s research?
A: I’m interested in new behaviors made possible by networks of people interacting with networks of devices. The concept of the Internet-of-Things—the idea that your pacemaker or car is connected to the network—has been around for quite some time, but people are starting to experiment a lot more.
We will look of course, at how the IoT is blending with health behaviors and health perceptions; how people and groups use mobile devices in combination with small hardware widgets or things on their bodies, in their bodies, and across different environments, whether on land, in the water or in the air, over time.
One vision of the Internet of Things, based on ubiquitous computing, is that dozens of objects and interfaces we use will fade into the background. And that’s definitely part of the picture. But what’s interesting to me is the deliberative ways in which people will experiment with objects, and how these might reveal relationships, events and relational structures in society.
Q: And what emerging practices or behaviors in this area are the most interesting to you?
A: Currently, we can communicate quite easily with others
using our voices, text, or video. What is of most interest is
discovering ways to convey a person’s subjective experience—of relaxation or stress, pain, anger or joy—with others so that people can feel or sense them as well. With more sophisticated chemical, optical and electronic sensors in the market that can detect our physiological state, artists and technologists have a wealth of data to play with. People will be designing augmented environments that convey a person’s intangible emotions or bodily state to others. Today, if a health specialist asks a patient with chronic arthritis how much pain they are in, the patient has to rate their subjective experience on a numerical scale or describe it. That’s clunky. Wouldn’t it be easier for patients to use sensors and visualizations to help them pinpoint, capture and portray their state to a doctor?