The Design of Serendipity
Is Not by Chance
Liz Danzico

School of Visual Arts | [e-mail]

 

as Everyware, Shaping Things, and Digital Ground, we have manifestos for moving forward in these spaces. What role will serendipity play as the layers have the ability to grow increasingly specific, while the possibilities grow with increasing disorder?

 

[ 1] McGuirk, J. “The Urban Age: How Cities Became Our Greatest Design Challenge Yet.” The Guardian. 29 March 2010; http:// www.guardian.co.uk/ artanddesign/2010/ mar/29/urban-age- cities-design/

Chance leads to the possibility of new behaviors, new patterns, new ideas, and new structures. It allows people to change their behavior in response to context, in the moment, however fleeting. How might we help recapture serendipitous moments by helping coordinate chance? And what is the role of technology and interaction design? As the power that citizens have with their media grows, so must we grow opportunities for creative exploration, new ideas, and chance encounters.

 

September + October 2010

[ 2] “The Meanings
of ‘Serendip’”; http://
serendip.brynmawr.edu/
serendip/ about.html/
interactions

Technology can aid efficiency— it can prevent us from getting lost, make locating the nearest restaurant easy, help us avoid inconvenient traffic, and eliminate the wait time between physicians and patients. Yet aided by apps and served by services, we leave little up to chance. We seek out the specific. We cut out needless words. We know that less is more. And therefore, we’ve adopted technology to aid us.

But we know that with this efficiency may come drawbacks: People may be less exposed to chance or less inclined to try new things; behavior may be planned such that there are no discoveries or surprises. Technology may be increasing the opportunity for specificity, but is it decreasing our chances for serendipity?

Half of humanity now lives in cities, and in two decades, nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will be urban dwellers [ 1]. Cities are not only growing in size and population, but their very interface is changing. They’re being layered with information so we can search, sort, and archive data in a way that makes them endlessly exact. On the other hand, with this exactitude something may be lost.

With more people in urban places than ever before, something else has occurred: Space is a mixture of physical and digital spaces. With guides such

From Serendip to the Present

The term “serendipity” dates
back 250 years to a somewhat
storied beginning. Horace
Wadpole, English writer and poli-
tician, committed the word to
paper in reference to a fairy tale,
“The Three Princes of Serendip.”
In a 1754 letter, Wadpole coined
the term when he described the
three princes’ adventures near
Serendip: “As their highnesses
travelled, they were always mak-
ing discoveries, by accident and
sagacity, of things which they
were not in quest of” [ 2]. Falling
somewhere between accidental
and sagacity, serendipity is syn-
onymous with neither one nor
the other, perhaps closest only to
“chance encounters.”
Chance encounters, by
chance, are often present in
discovery. Whether they’re
attributed to Columbus’s dis-
covery of America, Newton’s
naming of gravity, or Nobel’s
discovery of dynamite, in travel,
medicine, science, technology,
and inventions, serendipity
is often cited as a key factor
in the success of the new.

By Accident New ideas, specifically in the area of invention, are commonly inspired by chance encounters. In 1948 Swiss inventor George de Mestral, returning from a walk through the Alpine with his dog, noticed the cockleburs that were stuck to his dog’s coat and his own pant legs. When he returned home to study the burs under a microscope, he found the surface contained tiny sticking mechanisms. At the time, he hadn’t been consciously planning to invent such a device, but the bur construction reminded him of an alternative for fastening clothing. He had, as it happens, just recently been annoyed by a stuck zipper on his wife’s dress. It took six years to work out the details, but in 1957 Velco was patented— a portmanteau of the French