Many thanks to the British Sociological Association who have kindly supported The Serendipity Engine with an Early Career Forum Professional Development Award.
The funding will be used towards the development of the framework and methodology of the project.
Many thanks to the British Sociological Association who have kindly supported The Serendipity Engine with an Early Career Forum Professional Development Award. The funding will be used towards the development of the framework and methodology of the project.
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The column I wrote about serendipity for The Observer series Untangling the Web was published in the paper while I was out of town. It got some great responses across Twitter and on The Guardian.
Consider it a summary of my thinking about this subject to date.
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I write The Observer’s fortnightly column Untangling the Web, an unpicking of the real effects of the communication technology on human social processes from the hype. I’ve tackled everything from love and sex to social change and hate, from health to youth culture to celebrity to comedy. It’s been an inspiring year.
For my next column, I’ve decided to marry my multiple interests and write about serendipity. Here’s my blurb from The Guardian’s technology blog:
Serendipity, the enigmatic process that’s been credited with producing everything from penicillin to the chocolate chip cookie, is the almost-magical convergence of a (happy) accident and the sagacity of knowing what to do with it.
The web has been described by some pundits as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture”, and commercial companies - like Google - are looking to harvest your enormous cloud of data to deliver serendipitous experiences before you even know what to search for.
But other pundits have decried the web’s filtering mechanics for reducing serendipity, and potentially stifling innovation rather than creating it.
So who’s right? Is the web a serendipity machine or a tool for cultural homogenisation? Or is it, like so many things, not nearly so black and white?
This fortnight, I tackle a pet topic: what is the web doing for (or against) serendipity. Follow the progress on the Untangling the Web blog for all the links, interviews, photos, videos, articles and academic research on serendipity and the web that will feed this article.
Send your thoughts to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk, comment below, or @ me on Twitter @aleksk. I look forward to being inspired.
I’ll be cross-posting many of my findings here and on the Untangling the Web tumblog and the 900-word summary (aka “the column”) will be published on 21 August.
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Chris Thorpe is the co-founder of Artfinder, an ex-Guardian developer, one half of consultancy jaggeree and a lettered research scientist. We have a mutual obsession with serendipity.
Over the last year, many of our conversations have glanced on the concept; some have been recorded for posterity (on The Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast and on social media), others have been lost in the ephemera of meatspace. And while Chris concurs with my blue-sky social scientific conceptualisation, his work as a programmer has placed pragmatic limitations on how serendipity can actually be applied in cold, hard, binary (virtual) reality.
Chris’ work as a research scientist/technologist has evolved into an interest in large databases and the ways they can be used to help people discover new things. Case in point, Artfinder is a service that, using a database of all of the art in museums around the world, ostensibly helps people bump up into new art that they would probably like.
This precisely sums up my problem with so-called digital serendipity solutions. And so this is precisely what Chris, Kat and I talked about.
In the process, we landed on two key things:
Here’s more:
How To Produce Web-Based Happy Accidents
Serendipity is “too important a mechanism to ignore,” says Chris, but the way the web works is as a filter - designed to give a specific answer - which ignores serendipity. This is a linear approach.
He sees his alternative as curatorial - designed to give an outcome in which the result is a collection of “objects”. The connections and analyses - that which ultimately produces the sagacity which in turn returns the value (to the beneficiary) of serendipity - are the consumer’s responsibility. The pathway branches.
A branching pathway is much more difficult to code because it doesn’t scale.
Chris believes that the question we must ask as consumers is how we want to discover.
On this concept, our conversation turned to Matt Jones, co-founder of travel-based social networking site Dopplr & now one of the principles at London design studio Berg. Matt described my own predilection nicely in a post about to maximise coincidence (note: I didn’t say serendipity) based on physical location. This tweet from his stream (in the post) sums it up nicely:
“Hereish/Nowish/Soonish/Good Enough” aren’t being built into technological solutions because there’s a fetishisation of precision. For example, we don’t get search results that seem off the mark; we discarded services that didn’t offer relevance long ago.
In his post, Matt argues that the future cannot be automated, but future coincidences might occur because of the future intentionality Dopplr users share with people they trust.
BUT. A serendipitous discovery might occur via Dopplr because the system’s accompanying “visualisations, tips, statistics and other tools” allow you to “reflect on your past travels”. This is a bedrock upon which sagacity might bloom. It produces the methods and materials for you to make the connections yourself, drawing on your self-knowledge.
Chris wants developers to complicate their creations even more: forcing awkward connections by juxtaposing “unrelated” (but thematic) content. But this demands thoughtfulness from the perspective of the curator-developer. It means that they must blend the randomness in so people don’t think of it as error.
Anti-Flow
Is the web itself the problem? We are so active as we traverse across it that we can’t experience the magnificent flow (see Csikszentmihalyi’s publications), allowing our minds bimble as we do something else utterly immersive:
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
I experience flow most frequently when I’m running or cycling through the city streets. What is exceptionally flow-ful is that when I am utterly physically focussed on not getting killed by a taxi, a bus or a truck, my mind is able to wander and process something else. I guess this is what Steven Johnson means when he says one of the ingredients in the Good Idea Recipe is to take A Creative Walk, or A Hot Bath.
We can’t do that online. We go online to find stuff out, to do things. Our HeadRAM is totally taken up with these tasks and cannot wander, process, make lateral connections. We are fully occupied, but not in a way that encourages us to think about or make sense of anything else.
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My big question is, do developers really want to create serendipity? I think the answer is no. I think they want to create discovery machines that provide solutions to consumers because that’s why consumers go to the Web.
Discovery can be managed, engineered, programmed. Serendipity - occasionally the product of discovery - cannot.
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Kat and I had a chat over a tea and cake at Drink, Shop, Do last month about what we’d like to do with the Serendipity Engine project (as a physical representation of a process, as an articulation of the scientific method, as a series of commissioned and curated devices/events/talks/performances/publications to explore the locally and culturally bound nature of serendipity). We talked about a lot of things - talks we’re giving, building materials we need, dream design projects we’d like to work on - but most importantly we decided two things:
• how the Serendipity Engine fits into the Enquiry Machine series
• what’s problematic about the processes the technologists are using to build their serendipity engines
The Enquiry Machines series (aka “instruments of enquiry”) seeks to render visible the processes of enquiry. As Kat describes, “by making something visible, you ask the audience to ask questions about it”.
Our starting point in this EM#2 is to take as a framework/starting point technology and the Web. In this research project we’re seeking to understand how serendipity is currently missing from the knowledge production environment.
Specifically, we seek to disrupt a culture that (we feel) frames the serendipity experience as solution-driven: the “serendipity engine” that commercial digital organisations (from Google to Artfinder) are trying to create will answer questions about how to produce serendipitous answers and outcomes. The engines they will produce will be self-fulfilling because they will be embedded in the ideologies of what are considered valid and relevant “answers” and “outcomes”.
Their inputs will anticipate their outputs.
That doesn’t sound like accidental discovery to me. Nor does it sound like sound science.
Furthermore, we have no idea what those inputs are, or what they are (explicitly or implicitly) motivated by.
Full disclosure: this project does have an output that is defined as serendipity. This has been a matter of debate between Kat and I. But the way we have come to terms with this is that our approach will render visible the processes that lead to our defined serendipity outcome, not occlude them. Serendipity must be defined in order to establish the frame through which to identify the variables that can be used to enquire about it. The definition can necessarily include what it isn’t.
The nature of the Enquiry Machines is to inquire about enquiry: the outcome is itself the question. Thus, the Serendipity Engine demands that the outcome be the realisation (or not) of serendipity.
We are currently establishing the basic theoretical infrastructure, identifying the independent variables described in social theory (our particular specialty) that have been found to contribute to an outcome of serendipity.
In future, we hope to expand this infrastructure by enlisting people from other disciplines, approaches, frameworks, cultures, perspectives (from particle physics to mathematics to baking to knitting to performance to sound to art to pathological lying) to help define the inputs that will go into the engine. The reason we will open this out is because any leaderboard of what best predicts a serendipitous outcome will very likely change with each new input. That’s interesting.
The process of enquiry is not fixed. That is the problem with digital solutions to human experiences.
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The Serendipity Engine gets its first outing on Monday 8 August at The Driver in London at sameAs, an evening of conversation and intellectual stimulation. I’ll be presenting with my co-conspirator, Kat Jungnickel, who’ll also be showcasing her Enquiry machine with Julian McHardy. The three of us will be joined by Natalie Downe of Lanyrd.
cross-posted from alekskrotoski.com
The Serendipity Engine gets its first outing on Monday 8 August at The Driver in London at sameAs, an evening of conversation and intellectual stimulation. I’ll be presenting with my co-conspirator, Kat Jungnickel, who’ll also be showcasing her Enquiry machine with Julian McHardy. The three of us will be joined by Natalie Downe of Lanyrd.
Here’s the blurb:
This month’s sameAs will focus on the topic “serendipity” in the digital age, highlighting some of the top tool developers and thinkers dedicated to showing how the Web affects our chance encounters, conversations, how we interact with technology.In true sameAs spirit, we’re bringing together a diverse set of friends and experts to show the breadth of the subject. All are welcome.
The event starts at 7 and is free. They’re usually packed out, so come early!
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I opened the Internet Advertising Bureau’s ENGAGE2010 summit in October (followed – intimidatingly – by Carol Bartz, Yahoo!’s formidable CEO) with a talk that aimed to provoke the advertising creatives in the room to consider what impact that their actions were having on the experiences of the people who consume the World Wide Web.
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