[ 6] Leong, T. W., F. Vetere , and S. Howard. “The Serendipity Shuffle.” Proc19th OZCHI, (CHISIG) Australia, 2005, 1-4.

offered by digital music players, whereby listeners can abdicate choice to the system to deliver the digital music tracks to them in a random order.

The threads of online discussion forums, blogs, and other online news sites report positive experiences of fun, joy, thrill, and even serendipity when listening to music in shuffle mode. In some cases, these experiences have caused listeners to rethink what they thought they knew about the music they enjoy and to pursue new ways of reinvigorating their audio palate. Listeners use the unpredictability of shuffle listening to engender certain affective responses, such as to feel refreshed, to be surprised, or to be thrilled, etc. In some cases listeners report more intense and richer experiences, such as a “happy coincidence” or serendipity [ 6].

Unlike the use of randomness in random blogs and random searches, the shuffle listener is able to constrain randomness. For instance, a listener may choose only to shuffle from a particular playlist or set of genres (instead of shuffling from the entire music library)—thus constraining the level of randomness in the presentation of content.

With Apple’s i Tunes 5 software, a “smart shuffle” slider function further allowed listeners to adjust the degree of randomness during playback. Compared with all previous examples, shuffle listening (at least in conjunction with music software such as i Tunes) offers a high level of listener control in the management and manipulation of randomness. This management of randomness is found to be influenced in part by the listener’s mood, activities, and different contexts of use, e.g., when shuffling music through a system in social situations or the use of shuffle through an individual player such as an iPod. From this it appears that the affordance of interactivity (mediated by computational technology) may provide new and novel opportunities for emergent approaches to randomness, whereby it could be harnessed in designs to enhance and stimulate user experiences.

 

Harnessing Randomness Purposefully Devices today can cheaply store a great deal of digital content. The standard 30 gigabyte iPod can store up to 7,500 songs, 20,000 photos, or 75 hours of video playback. When interacting with

May + June 2008

interactions

USING RANDOMNESS

1. Embrace randomness in the design of interactive systems and seek out possibilities of how random encounters can be harnessed to stimulate delight, wonder, and even serendipity.

2. Random presentation of digital content can loosen personal inscriptions and acts in order to defamiliar-ize that content.

3. The richness of people’s interactive experiences when encountering randomness is influenced by their perception of the level of randomness encountered. When people perceive that a sense of randomness is at play, it is likely they will eventually encounter a feeling of serendipity through the experience of use.

4. When designing interactive systems that allow people to abdicate choice to randomness, the system should allow people to quickly and easily regain control of the interaction.

some content, particularly with personal content such as images, music, or even videos, our needs are often noninstrumental—our actions are without any explicit or clear goal, and instead are experiential. We seek to simply enjoy, reminisce, or explore. When designing digital devices for such contexts of use where there is often no strong preference for a particular choice, letting the digital device choose randomly may stimulate positive user experiences.

However, abdicating choice to randomness may not always lead to positive or desirable experiences. Examination of digital-music listeners reveals that not all choose to shuffle their content because the experience may be jarring and unpleasant. When drawing from their music libraries, different listeners have differing levels of tolerance for unpredictability and uncertainty. The designed interface must also feature the ability for people to individually configure the level of randomness encountered through the device, pointing to the important duality between randomness and constraint. This enables people to modulate randomness on the fly under different and changing contexts of use. Through a device, randomness in the consumers’ hands can act as a resource for designing their own experience.

In the shuffle example, the random presentation of familiar content and content that is inscribed with its own memories smudges the person’s original conception of the content, marking it with ambiguity, and—to an extent—defamiliarizing the familiar. When people encounter unpredictability and surprise,