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:
- to maximise the experience of happy accidents, web designers should curate not-quite-right solutions and let consumers do the processing
- it’s possible to produce coincidence online, but it’s not possible to engineer serendipity because we are always too active to achieve flow
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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