The Intel Research Labs were a research division of Intel. The organization was known for most of its life as Intel Research, but towards the end of its life the name Intel Research was re-defined to refer to all research performed in Intel, including work done outside the labs.
At its peak, there were six Intel Research Labs. The four university labs were each hosted by a partner university, while the two on-site labs were embedded inside normal Intel sites. Intel Research Berkeley was hosted by UC Berkeley, Intel Research Seattle by the University of Washington, Intel Research Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University, and Intel Research Cambridge by the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
In addition, the People and Practices Research Lab (PaPR) performed ethnographic research at Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon campus, and one at Intel's Santa Clara, California headquarters. The Intel PaPR was composed of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists whose job it was to understand how people lived their lives with or without technology, and how technology might be able to help. [1] They used ethnography as their methodology which involves trying to understand how people live their lives, visiting consumers in their homes and workplaces, to see people’s behaviour on their terms within their experiences. Often, consumers cannot articulate what they are looking for in a product, product feature, or service. The Intel PaPR lab could, using ethnography, discover emerging trends that would then inform Intel's business strategy. By understanding the perspective of one group, consumers, they could communicate it to another, such as Intel business decision makers and engineers. Dr Genevieve Bell led PaPR through many years.[2]