Serendipity Engine

• From theserendipityengine

  00:40:00 Wednesday Mar 07 2012

  I recently convened two workshops for the masters students in the Media and Communications Department at LSE, where I’m a Visiting Fellow.

  It was an opportunity to introduce the making methodology to students as part of their toolkit in research practice, and to explore alternative understandings of “Google” than that which Kat and I have devised in the serendipity engine. Kat spoke with them the day before; this put her theory into practice.

  Alison Powell and I asked the students two questions:

  1. What human need does Google fulfill?
  2. What does Google look like?

  We had asked them to bring physical examples of personal data, and we provided a treasure trove of curiosities (well, glue guns, rubber bands, glitter and other ephemera).

  This is a summary of their Googles. Here is the Flickr set of their pieces.

  Group 1 created a sprawling Google universe with a centralised brain that draws in many inputs to produce outputs. They placed special emphasis on the extent to which Google spreads its economic and political power across all of these things, as well as the boundaries that define its power.

  Group 2 considered how Google delivers its results from our personal data - integrating one student’s loyalty cards from local shops to international brands - in conjunction with brand power, interconnections and keywords. Theirs was a very commercial observation of the service.

  Group 3 considered the geographical and cultural filters that Google considers/implements/restricts, and how these affect what Google thinks we are looking for (and therefore what it delivers) and how far it is able to reach, globally.

  Group 4 represented Google as a man - a happy man - through whom our personal data and our queries are analysed and synthesised, and then redelivered into the various media outputs it delivered.

  Group 5 considered Google a way of connecting like-minded individuals through search and discovery, and how new connections - between people - increased the weight of the collective understanding of information, thus making it more likely to be served.

  Many many thanks to the students of the Masters course for participating in this experiment and for embracing the task, and to Alison for offering the opportunity to extend my understanding of the making method as research practice.

  

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• From theserendipityengine

  18:40:55 Wednesday Jan 18 2012

  Strip away the nostalgia and maybe our moments of serendipitous discovery before the Internet are much more rational than we would like to think.

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• Happy wanderings

  00:21:02 Wednesday Jan 18 2012

  More on the latest serendipity appearances here.

  Read More on alekskrotoski.com

• [Serendipity Engine] Recent wanderings

  Tuesday January 17, 2012 @ 12:22 AM (UTC)

  The serendipity engine has been on the road over the last few months, making appearances at the University of Cambridge at the Arcadia Seminar series, at Google at the Luvvies and Boffins event, for New Humanist‘s/Robin Ince’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People at the Bloomsbury Theatre, and this week in Leicester at DeMontfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies research seminar series.

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• [LSE] Visiting Fellowship

  Thursday January 12, 2012 @ 07:05 PM (UTC)

  This week I started my Visiting Fellowship in the Media and Communications Department at the LSE. I’m absolutely thrilled to be part of this incredibly dynamic group of learned academics and incredibly inspiring researchers. I’ll be at the LSE until September 2012, working on two projects.

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• From theserendipityengine

  15:29:49 Wednesday Dec 14 2011

  Alfred … puts serendipitous recommendations in the palm of a consumer’s hand. Dubbed “Pandora for the real world,” Alfred is a personal robot that can learn users’ tastes when they teach it about their favorite places in the real world.

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• Little Printer

  12:24:27 Tuesday Dec 13 2011

  from the brains at BERG London.

  WANTING.. for Serendipity Engine v2.0 (in production from Jan 2012)

  WAITING.. until it’s released

  Read More on bergcloud.com

• From theserendipityengine

  14:15:13 Tuesday Nov 15 2011

  We’ve been collecting memories on to surrogate objects so that the things people buy in the Vintage shop along the street are ‘possessed’ by other peoples memories

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• The Serendipity Engine Manifesto

  19:00:06 Tuesday Nov 08 2011

  The Serendipity Engine is an artefact of knowing and an artefact of not-knowing
  It reflects and produces everyday practices and knowledges
  It is not bound by one form of human or technical engagement.
  It is not fixed in place. Embedded in a suitcase, it is infinitely mobile, fluid and capable of infinite modularity.
  It makes visible the existence of multiple forms of connections.
  It resists being defined and resists knowing all the time.
  It claims uncertainty and ambiguity.
  It is about what works and doesn’t work
  It is work.
  It combines and entangles unexpected encounters
  It is contained and uncontainable
  It is your task
  
  Make your own.

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• How Serendipity Works: behind the Royal Institution lecture

  09:01:05 Tuesday Nov 08 2011

  I had 5 minutes to do nothing but stare at my computer during a lock-off shot whilst recording The Culture Show film on serendipity last week, and jotted down a few of the thoughts about the function of tonight’s lecture at The Royal Institution, the expectations of the audience, and why we are there talking about what we’re talking about.

  The context and the expectation is that people will come to see a difficult concept made sense of - to see something that’s hard to comprehend demonstrated in a way that makes it clear. That is the history of this space. That is our mission.

  As an exercise, I decided to replace the word “serendipity” with “trigonometry”, “quarks”, “black holes” and “microelectronics”. And it suddenly occurred to me: we will be delivering a How Stuff Works lecture, where the Stuff that we’re explaining can’t be explained in an easy way. That’s why the MONIAC computer was created. That’s why the beautiful machine method works. That’s why Kat and I are making an engine. 

  Rather than taking what is traditionally considered a physical concept (i.e., waveforms, chemical properties, even cognitive psychologies) we will extract a psychological attribution, a social phenomenon - a human-oriented conceit that has been generated by and has evolved throughout our social histories to explain something that is both mystical and rooted in our need to establish human control. It is manifested by our sense-making only. And, like mathematics or theoretical physics, or anything that cannot (yet?) be measured, we are seeking to explain it.

  Just like the process of enquiry.

  Tonight, Kat and I will enter into a space that has, since Faraday’s time, offered delight through explanation. We will demonstrate and explain the concept of serendipity.

  We have produced a machine that seeks to explain what is in the black box, leaving to the viewers’ discretion - and personal sense-making process - what is missing.

  There will be a lot that is missing. But that’s the point.

  We will attempt to avoid a wooly, “but it can’t be explained!” explanation; people come to the RI lectures to come away with new knowledge and new information. 

  We hope that what we have produced - through the various workshops, the welding, the collaboration with generous contributors, the drilling, the sawdust and the amateur electronic engineering - will delight. Then we will have succeeded in doing what we set out to do.

  Join us tonight at 7pm and let us know!

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