Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy

The Serendipity Engine

What is serendipity

#ozchi24

An important aspect of our design process was trying to determine a definition of serendipity that we all agreed on. As we wandered about Hobart CBD and the Salamanca Markets the ideas of the pleasant surprise and the joy of the accidental discovery really jumped out at us as what we felt was truly serendipity. We decided that serendipity is essentially something random and uncontrollable, something that cannot be engineered. But the experience could be discovered through changing the everyday into something with less restrictions than what the daily routine can provide.

The process

Our design process began with a brainstorming session where any and every idea was discussed and written down into a shared google doc. We decided to focus on the isolated experience of “wandering within an environment” lived by people ever day. Then with this in mind we decided to roam around Hobart and surrounds to try and grapple with the concept of serendipity, hoping for a serendipitous event to occur.

The ideas presented by Zuckerman about a cities inhabitants becoming more isolated and remaining inside the restricted spheres of their daily routine led us to try and think of ways to break into the everyday and insert some randomness into peoples lives.

To this end we combined the concepts of Smart-Its and intelligent environments along with the idea of designing for randomness that may lead to a serendipitous experience. Through this process we arrived at the idea of “The Serendipity Engine”, created using a series of “smart” objects from our daily lives such as walls or trees that would interact with people passing-by. The engine is designed to be simple, it’s goal is to merely facilitate a break in the ordinary. From our own experiences of wandering around Hobart, and from the literature we read, we noticed all it takes is for the ordinary to be modified in a small way for serendipitous events to possibly occur.

The implementation

We used an iterative design process to create a prototype of a “smart” object which would make up the serendipity engine. Following each design iteration we conducted a real-world evaluation of the smart object prototype. Our evaluations were informed by a combination of observation and interview of potential members of our user population.

The ending

The Serendipity Engine will allow people to momentarily break free of their routine, insert a little random into their lives and hopefully lead them into unique serendipitous encounters, the future for The Serendipity Engine is nigh on boundless.

References

L. Holmquist, H. Gellersen, G. Kortuem, S. Antifakos, F. Michahelles, B. Schiele, M. Beigl, and R. Maze. Building intelligent environments with smart-its. Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE, 24(1):56 –64, jan.-feb. 2004.

T. Leong, S. Howard, and F. Vetere. Feature: Take a chance on me: using randomness for the design of digital devices. interactions, 15:16– 19, May 2008.

T. W. Leong, P. Wright, F. Vetere, and S. Howard. Understanding experience using dialogical methods: the case of serendipity. InProceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, OZCHI ’10, pages 256–263, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.

Zuckerman, E. 2011, CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity, 1 October 2011, <http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/05/12/chi-keynote-desperately-seeking-serendipity/>