Pitney-Bowes Taps Anthropologists to Seek New Ideas
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HARTFORD, Conn. – The culture and customs of work are under scrutiny by a pair of anthropologists at Pitney Bowes Inc. trying to improve product designs by watching customers on the job.
Jill Lawrence and Alexandra Mack work at the Advanced Concepts and Technology division, Pitney Bowes’s research and design unit in Shelton. They observe how users of Pitney Bowes products do their jobs, then help develop products that improve the work done by the company’s customers.
“It’s understanding the work people are actually doing, not what they’re saying they do,” Ms. Mack said.
There’s a difference between the two, as the anthropologists tell it. They discovered, for example, a group of lawyers who use e-mail to compile lists of projects as much as they use it to communicate electronically, Ms. Lawrence said.
“There are many cases of technology being delivered to the marketplace without an idea that it’s going to be used,” Pitney Bowes spokesman Chris Tessier said.
Discrepancies between how technology is designed and how it functions prompted the project.
