It’s hard to imagine a part of an electronic device which is more removed from and esoteric to the end user than the processor chip. However, even Intel, a company that designs and manufactures chips, is interested in creating experiences. They’ve invested substantially in exploring the human aspects of what their technology can enable.
Because Intel isn’t an OEM customer, a fabless shop, or a foundry, it ends up having to be all three at once if it wants to play the SoC game. That’s one place where the ethnographers come in.
The ethnographers essentially stand in for OEM devicemakers, in that they provide Intel with market-oriented input into the kinds of products that the company should be designing SoCs for. In other words, the user experience researchers can function as substitute “customers,” so that Intel can iterate its products internally in conversation with a kind of “market.”
How Moore’s Law drove Intel into the arms of anthropologists
on Ars Technica