Designing for Serendipity, a Means or an End?

Purpose This article aims to gain a better understanding of the reasons why serendipity is designed for in different kinds of environments. Understanding these design intents sheds light on the value such designs bring to designers, in contrast to the users of the environment. In this way, the article seeks to contribute to the literature on cultivating serendipity from a designers’ point of view. Design/methodology/approach An extensive review of the literature discussing designing for serendipity was conducted to elicit the different motivations to design for serendipity. Based on these findings and a thorough analysis, a typology of design intents for serendipity is presented. Findings The article puts forward four intents to design for serendipity: serendipity as an ideal, common good, mediator and feature. It also highlights that the current academic discourse puts a strong emphasis on two of them. It is argued that this academic abstraction could be problematic for how we deal with designs for serendipity, both in theory and practice. Originality/value The novelty of this article is that it addresses the question of why to design for serendipity from a designer’s point of view. By introducing the notion of directionality it opens up the opportunity to discuss serendipity from multiple perspectives, which contributes to gaining a firmer understanding of serendipity. It allows to more explicitly formulate the different functions of a design for serendipity and thereby expands our knowledge on the value of designing for serendipity. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential threats to designing for serendipity

Exploring the future of data-driven product design

Connected devices present new opportunities to advance design through data collection in the wild, similar to the way digital services evolve through analytics. However, it is still unclear how live data transmitted by connected devices informs the design of these products, going beyond performance optimisation to support creative practices. Design can be enriched by data captured by connected devices, from usage logs to environmental sensors, and data about the devices and people around them. Through a series of workshops, this paper contributes industry and academia perspectives on the future of data-driven product design. We highlight HCI challenges, issues and implications, including sensemaking and the generation of design insight. We further challenge current notions of data-driven design and envision ways in which future HCI research can develop ways to work with data in the design process in a connected, rich, human manner

News Recommender Systems and News Diversity, Two of a Kind? A Case Study from a Small Media Market

Content recommender systems have become commonplace in all digital platforms, and they profoundly alter the media content presented to users. This also applies to news recommender systems (NRSs) used by media companies. However, as it is generally accepted that diverse news coverage is crucial to maintain democratic societies, the role of NRSs is frequently questioned. We assess the development processes of NRSs at three media companies: two private ones active in several European countries, and one public service broadcaster, using a previously established conceptual model for news diversity. Ultimately, we find that news personalization is currently still more of an idea than an actual recurrent practice, and that the application of NRSs is integrated and harmonized across countries and/or other types of new media types (e.g., streaming services) of the same company. We highlight similarities and differences in approaches, objectives and rationales between private and public companies

Mediated by Code: Unpacking Algorithmic Curation of Urban Experiences

Amid the widespread diffusion of digital communication technologies, our cities are at a critical juncture as these technologies are entering all aspects of urban life. Data-driven technologies help citizens to navigate the city, find friends, or discover new places. While these technology-mediated activities come in scope of scholarly research, we lack an understanding of the underlying curation mechanisms that select and present the particular information citizens are exposed to. Nevertheless, such an understanding is crucial to deal with the risk of the socio-cultural polarization assumedly reinforced by this kind of algorithmic curation. Drawing upon the vast amount of work on algorithmic curation in online platforms, we construct an analytical lens that is applied to the urban environment to establish an understanding of algorithmic curation of urban experiences. In this way, this article demonstrates that cities could be considered as a new materiality of curational platforms. Our framework outlines the various urban information flows, curation logics, and stakeholders involved. This work contributes to the current state of the art by bridging the gap between online and offline algorithmic curation and by providing a novel conceptual framework to study this timely topic