Chance Favours the Prepared Mind

As one of the newest members on the SerenA project, I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to get my head around what SerenA is, what forms SerenA will take, and what SerenA will actually look like. And, naturally enough, my understanding of this has emerged between discussions and reflections around what serendipity is, and how we can design for serendipity.

Ah, there, that’s torn it. “Design for Serendipity.” An oxymoronic phrase if ever there was one. Serendipity is by definition an accidental discovery, a way of finding out what you didn’t know you needed to know.

How then can we design serendipity? To state it bluntly, we can’t. Crucially though, to quote Louis Pasteur, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. Can we design or create an experience which helps users achieve a prepared frame of mind, one which is open to serendipitous possibilities? Possibly. Hopefully.

So let’s go back a step. Now that we’ve discounted the premise of engineering serendipity, and realised that serendipity is a personal occurrence, dependent on one’s frame of mind, and the individual’s capitalisation of opportunities, let’s have a think about what SerenA might look like. (For more eloquent discussions around what shape the serendipity space can take I recommend reading some of my colleagues earlier blog posts.)

SerenA will take several forms, including interactive public displays and events, but the current focus for the design team is on a mobile device experience. Put simply, this mobile flavour of SerenA will enable researchers to make connections between themselves and resources (e.g. academic publications & conferences) and between themselves and other researchers. But where’s the serendipity in that? Lots of existing services do peer-to-peer networking (Facebook & LinkedIn are two of the most popular examples), and you can get off-the-shelf recommender systems easily enough.

SerenA, however, is different. Honestly. SerenA will provide you with connections you didn’t know you needed to know, tapping into semantic data and following reasoning paths to take you down avenues you wouldn’t have found by other means (differing, for example, from Google search results, or simply following a chain of someone’s connections on LinkedIn or Twitter). The serendipitous aspect comes from the semantic leaps the system will take, giving you suggestions which are not random, but equally not perhaps immediately self-evident.

Assuming that this under-the-hood intelligent reasoning system is a given (I like to think of it as some kind of magic black box), the design of the front-end which will enable and present potentially serendipitous connections is key. The user experience must be engaging, and encourage repeat interactions: one of SerenA’s underlying premises is that the more you engage with the system, the more it will learn and so the spectrum and quality of the suggested connections will grow. The design also needs to show that SerenA is different from other offerings (e.g. Facebook, Zite), that’s there’s an intrinsic benefit to using SerenA and perhaps even a subtle nod to its underlying structure. And that’s just a couple of our design challenges!

Practically speaking however, we’ve decided to adopt a ‘mobile first’ model. Mobile first is becoming increasingly recognised not only as a viable web design paradigm, but as an aspirational approach. Which always begs the next question: native or web app? And for SerenA this will be a native Android app in the first instance (due to technical system considerations).

It’s at this point that I get a little distracted, and start thinking about what role serendipity plays in the design process itself. I feel that I’ve been fortunate to experience serendipity in my doctoral research (maybe that’ll be the topic of my next SerenA blog post!), but I can’t think offhand of any concrete examples of serendipity in my design work. But I do feel confident that serendipity plays a critical role in design, and that lots of designers must have some great examples and stories. (Speaking of stories, if you have a few spare minutes, we’ve got five beautifully illustrated serendipity stories over on YouTube.)

So my final line is a call to the design community: what twisting paths have you been led along in a quest to find your design inspiration? What shape does the serendipity space take in your design process?

Answers on a postcard. (Or, preferably, as a blog comment or tweet.)

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Debbie Maxwell
@deb_max
Researcher
DJCAD, University of Dundee