Candidates should send a letter of introduction, curriculum vita, and a project proposal of no more than two (2) pages to Linda Illig (linda.illig@intel.com<mailto:linda.illig@intel.com>).
The earlier candidates can apply the better. Review will begin February 15, and continue until both positions are filled. Interns must work in Portland, OR. Relocation assistance is available.
Description
Intel’s Experience Insights Lab (XIL) is accepting applications for two internship positions. You would join our group within Intel Labs, Interaction & Experience Research (IXR), a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, design researchers, technologists, and business analysts. Intel Fellow Genevieve Bell recently established IXR as a world-class, industry-leading research organization to deliver breakthrough technologies that will bring the benefits of the ongoing digital revolution to everyone and fundamentally change the way computing is experienced.
Internships are limited to currently enrolled graduate students. Preferred areas of study include: social sciences, media art + design, informatics/human-computer interaction, cultural studies, and business. Interns must be willing to relocate to the Portland, Oregon area during the course of the internship to work on-site with the research team, and must be eligible to work in the US. Duration (preferably at least 13 weeks) and start date are flexible.
Project Proposal
Candidates should include in their application a brief proposal for a project they would like to work with us on, with relevance to one or more of the following ongoing research initiatives:
– Personal/Social Media. How can digital media better support the recording, representation, expression, and presentation of lived experience? How can we move beyond thinking in terms of “writing”, “photographs”, “audio recordings”, and “videos” towards something more directly or richly experience-based? In a future of ubiquitous media how will people want to think about, share, and re-live/re-imagine their lives?
– Social Participation. How does the proliferation of increasingly connected, increasingly capable devices enable new forms of collective action? How can people coordinate their activities to address needs and aspirations, and effect change in their environment at the local and global scale? What new forms of social organization arise in the Internet age, and how will they shape the next generation of digital technology?
– Life In-Between. Everyday life is full of rhythms and rituals as we move from place to place and from being alone to being together. As we move through every-day practices and temporalities questions arise about the relationship of ourselves to our environments. These include: What does immersion mean in a world full of spatial and temporal interruptions, and how do people work with or around these discontinuities? How are seemingly coherent experiences like affect, complexity, and privacy, actually fraught with discontinuity and “in-betweenness”? How do massive influxes and flows of data aggravate interaction or move us towards more immersion?
– Trust-Risk. As the world becomes technologically richer, we routinely connect to more people and sets of information than ever before. How are practices around assessing risk and granting trust changing? How are individuals becoming their own professional-amateur experts at using financial, health, or consumer data etc., to mitigate risk and increase reward? How do our social networks in helping us mitigate risk? Do these play out differently between generations or geographies? With on-line relationships gaining strength, for both individuals and institutions, what are the practices that enable trust? How do reputation systems operate in this realm? Are they to be trusted?
– Citizen Economics. While citizen science is a well-established practice, what would it mean to do “citizen economics”? With the proliferation of user-generated datasets, are their ways that citizens can help economists provide answers to economic problems of public interest? Conversely, how could people use rich datasets to challenge formal economic models, and to develop models of their economic lives that reflect their values? With sensor technologies tying datasets more readily to natural and built environments, are there new ways of re-valuing the physical environment?
– Models of Ownership. How are everyday experiences of ownership changing? How are timeframes and interests in owning products and services starting to change? Why and how is reputation valued? How are shifting practices of exchange creating new states of ownership? How do people use their individual interests in exchange to create communities not just to circulate products and services but also to generate new forms of social capital?
Responsibilities
– Refining and implementing their research plan in collaboration with the XIL team
– Conducting primary research
– Analyzing and reporting on secondary research
– Coordinating relationships with vendors and study participants
– Documenting and reporting research findings
Qualifications
– Applicants should be college graduates with a bachelor’s degree or higher, currently pursuing an advanced degree (master’s or PhD).
– Experience planning and conducting research, and analyzing and rolling up findings
– Ability to work autonomously and respond to guidance from a multidisciplinary team
– Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills
– Self-starter with ability to lead a project and independently implement an action plan
– Ability to influence internal project stakeholders and drive engagement and participation in your project
– Ability to network in a large, diverse organization in order to drive high quality results in a short time frame
– Ability to balance personal research interests and objectives with the needs of the research group
– High tolerance for a dynamic work environment with rapidly changing priorities
– Willingness to jump in and lend a hand on multiple projects
– Willingness and ability to travel
