Oregon Humanities’ 2015 Think & Drink series concludes with a conversation with cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell, vice president of Intel’s corporate strategy office, about how technologies affect our relationships with time, space, and each other.

As a social scientist in a corporation of engineers, Bell travels the world studying how people use technology in their homes and in public and uses that knowledge to help shape technologies of the future.

This work has taken some unusual directions. Bell and her Hillsboro-based team have cataloged the contents of strangers’ cars to better understand how people use technology on the move, equipped laptop computers with outward-facing screens to encourage people to talk to one another in public spaces, and developed a personal robot that can run apps like a smart phone. The connecting thread of all her work, as Bell puts it, is “the intersection of tech and culture.”

Think & Drink sparks provocative conversations about big ideas.