service to bring games to the
outdoor parks in Providence as
a way of encouraging people to
exercise. Another group, Alpkan
Kirayoglu, Elise Porter, Marco
Ojeda, and Salem Al-Qassimi,
presented “Fuego,” an iPhone app
that promises to take people to
new places by participating in a
hotter/colder game.
[ 6] Rhode Island School
of Design Graduate
Program in Graphic
Design; http://gd.risd.
edu/www/programs/
graduate/
[ 7] Meyers, M. A. Happy
Accidents: Serendipity
in Modern Medical
Breakthroughs. New
York: Arcade Publishers,
2007.
Buckminster Fuller’s idea for a
dome over Midtown Manhattan
to Raymond Loewy’s helicopter
landing field for Bryant Park—
the viewer layers their current
experience with the past.
Other Futures asks more questions than it answers, and for
that, it’s tremendously valuable.
On one hand, these juxtapositions help viewers consider the
status quo. Is this the best we
can do? On the other hand, viewers are provoked to think about
the big ideas of the brightest
minds from our past. Were they
thinking big enough? Can we
think bigger, and how have we
progressed since? Most important, Other Futures pushes
designers to consider what our
other futures can be.
Hitotoki forces its users to
examine similar questions with
current spaces. It’s forged a
strange new self-relationship
that spans time. Once users
become aware of moment layering, according to Mod, they often
bump into old selves—sometimes
pleasant, sometimes awkward.
“It shines a light on how much
you’ve changed or haven’t. And
it makes you consider how you’d
experience that same moment at
that same spot now,” he explains.
Chances Are
No product or service can be
entirely serendipitous. Because
we choose to use a product or
service in the first place, we have
made a choice, thus eliminating
some part of the serendipitous
equation. After all, as Louis
Pasteur said, “In the fields of
observation, chance favors only
the prepared mind” [ 7]. There
cannot be Wadpole’s intersection of sagacity and accident
when choice is involved. There
are, however, variations at play
all the time. Smart services
such as Dopplr, Foursquare,
and EveryBlock have designed
for chance encounters alongside of exact retrieval so users
can have dual experiences.
The designers have simply put
forth opportunities for people
to create their own pathways.
It is then up to us to find
chance. Chances are, we will.
September + October 2010
interactions
Graduate Serendipity
How much could we design for
serendipity? To test out some
of these ideas, I took to the
streets and recently conducted
a three-day workshop at Rhode
Island School of Design as part
of the Graphic Design Graduate
Program’s Visiting Designer
Lecture Series—an inventive the-
sis course put together by pro-
gram director Bethany Johns—
with the graphic-design graduate
students. [ 6] The students’ charge
was to create an interactive
product or service that would
inspire serendipity for them and
their neighbors in the city of
Providence. This was their call to
seek out and invite the unknown,
the unplanned, the unseen. They
imagined ways to craft interac-
tions so they could intentionally
influence new opportunities for
discovery and creativity. In a
culture steeped in exact queries,
specific interactions, precise
retrieval, and masterful custom-
ization, they imagined how their
community could be made better
through chance encounters.
AbOut the AuthOr Liz Danzico is
equal parts designer, educator, and editor.
She is chair and co-founder of the MFA in
Interaction Design Program at the School
of Visual Arts. She is an independent
consultant in New York, on the strategic
board for Rosenfeld Media, and on the
board of Design Ignites Change. In the
past, Danzico directed experience strategy
for AIGA and the information architec-ture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and
Razorfish New York. She lectures widely
and writes for Bobulate.com.
DOi: 10.1145/1836216.1836220
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0900 $10.00