Deborah Maxwell

“Making my own luck”: Serendipity strategies and how to support them in digital information environments

Serendipity occurs when unexpected circumstances and an “aha” moment of insight result in a valuable, unanticipated outcome. Designing digital information environments to support serendipity can not only provide users with new knowledge, but also propel them in directions they might not otherwise have traveled in—surprising and delighting them along the way. As serendipity involves unexpected circumstances it cannot be directly controlled, but it can be potentially influenced. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work has focused on providing a rich empirical understanding of how it might be influenced. We interviewed 14 creative professionals to identify their self‐reported strategies aimed at increasing the likelihood of serendipity. These strategies form a framework for examining ways existing digital environments support serendipity and for considering how future environments can create opportunities for it. This is a new way of thinking about how to design for serendipity; by supporting the strategies found to increase its likelihood rather than attempting to support serendipity as a discrete phenomenon, digital environments not only have the potential to help users experience serendipity but also encourage them to adopt the strategies necessary to experience it more often.

‘I want to be provoked’: public involvement in the development of the Northumberland Rock Art on Mobile Phones project

Abstract Northumberland has a long history of public engagement surrounding its ancient rock-art. Recent advances in digital technologies have enabled archaeologists to enrich this engagement through the provision of open access to substantial rock-art datasets online. Building on these achievements, the Rock Art on Mobile Phones (RAMP) project allows Northumberlands countryside visitors to access in situ interpretation at three rock-art areas on their mobile phones. During the RAMP co-experience workshops it emerged that the key issues the public expected to be addressed by the mobile interpretation included locating rock-art, the desire for ambiguity and speculation about rock-art, and connecting to the landscape. The paper discusses, on the one hand, how these themes were incorporated into RAMPs conceptual design and, on the other hand, how RAMP themes compare with the Audience Development Plan produced by the archaeologists who created an online database. We consider the implications of these findings for the development of open-access online resources and in situ public interpretation.

Situating Cultural Technologies Outdoors: Empathy in the Design of Mobile Interpretation of Rock Art in Rural Britain

Mobile applications are presently at the forefront of interpreting outdoor historical and archaeological sites. This chapter discusses the methodological approach adopted in the Rock art mobile project (RAMP) which addresses the challenge of designing and delivering mobile interpretation at three Neolithic and Early Bronze Age rock art areas in Northumberland, UK. RAMP proposes a departure from the more traditional design approaches of delivering scientific content in the form of an archaeological mobile guide. It acknowledges that rock art interpretation requires a ‘design space’, which facilitates empathy between users and designers, and allows the existing archaeological content, the public’s fascination with the ‘cryptic’ meaning of the rock art sites and the technological, environmental and personal situation of the user to be explored and to inspire technological development.

New Value Transactions: Understanding and Designing for Distributed Autonomous Organisations

New digital technologies such as Blockchain and smart contracting are rapidly changing the face of value exchange, and present exciting new opportunities for designers. This one-day workshop will explore the implications of emerging and future technologies using the lens of Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). DAOs introduce the principle that products and services may soon be owned and managed collectively and not by one person or authority, thus challenging traditional concepts of user communities, ownership and power. The HCI community has recently explored issues related to finance, money and collaborative practice; however, the implications of these emerging but rapidly ascending distributed organisations has not been examined. This one-day participatory workshop will combine presentations, case studies and group work sessions to understand, develop and critique these new forms of distributed power and ownership, and to practically explore how to design interactive products and services which enable, challenge or disrupt these emerging models.

Beebots-a-lula, Where's My Honey?: Design Fictions and Beekeeping

The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr Shores Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socio-economic factors. Themes from Mr Shores Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered.

SerenA: A Multi-site Pervasive Agent Environment That Supports Serendipitous Discovery in Research

We present SerenA, a multi-site, pervasive, agent environment that suppers serendipitous discovery in research. The project starts from the premise that human users cannot be aware of all the research information that is relevant to their work, because of the compartmentalisation of research into fields around particular journals, and, simply, because there is too much to know. In particular, the Semantic Web provides a resource which can assist, but there is more to be discovered than the things that a user might deliberately search for. SerenA, then, attempts to assist researchers by presenting them with information that they did not know they needed to know about their research.

StoryStorm: a collaborative exchange of methods for storytelling

The very act of communication is fundamentally an act of storytelling and so the stories we fashion about ourselves to make sense of our life experiences are intrinsically linked to our identity, nation, and sense of self [1], shaping our understanding of the world. Narrative and storytelling are as critical in todays society as at any other time in history. We see aspects of storytelling frequently appear in research, from development and design processes to new ideas, products and services. In these fields storytelling takes many guises, and, we argue, is often employed unconsciously. This workshop will take stock of existing storytelling processes and forms, and explore emerging digital means of capturing and sharing stories, as a methodological tool for addressing overarching empirical and collaborative interests of the DIS community. The workshop aims to bring together fields of design, HCI, ethnography and industry practitioners to understand and map the range of storytelling tools adopted during research processes, prototyping, and production; exploring how these processes are situated in a design lexicon. This will in turn initiate development of visual aids that distill and encode these practices for use in academia and beyond.

Story Blocks : Reimagining narrative through the blockchain

Digital technology is changing, and has changed the ways we create and consume narratives, from moving images and immersive storyworlds to digital long-form and multi-branched story experiences. At the same time, blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is revolutionizing the way that transactions and exchanges occur. As a globally stored and collaboratively written list of all transactions that have ever taken place within a given system, the blockchain decentralizes money and offers a platform for its creative use. There are already examples of blockchain technologies extending beyond the realm of currency, including the decentralization of domain name servers that are not subject to government takedown and identity management and governance. By framing key blockchain concepts with past and present storytelling practices, this article raises questions as to how the principles and implementation of such distributed ledger technologies might be used within contemporary writing practices – that is, can we imagine stories as a currency or value system? We present three experiments that draw on some of the fundamental principles of blockchain and Bitcoin, as an instantiation of a blockchain implemented application, namely, (1) the ledger, (2) the blocks and (3) the mining process. Each low-fi experiment was intentionally designed to be very accessible to take part in and understand and all were conducted as discrete workshops with different sets of participants. Participants included a cohort of design students, technology industry and design professionals and writing and interaction design academics. Each experiment raised a different set of reflections and subsequent questions on the nature of digital, the linearity (or not) of narratives and collaborative processes.

Playful Research Fiction: A Fictional Conference

Fiction has long been important to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and practice. Through familiar tools such as personas, scenarios and role-play, fictions can support the exploration and communication of complex psychological, social and technical requirements between diverse collections of designers, developers and end-users. More recently, HCI and design research has embraced the development and evaluation of make-believe technologies as a way to speculate and study the possible future effects of technological innovation, since it enables us to unpack and understand the implications of technology that does not yet exist. In this chapter we explore the weird relationship between fiction and technology research through the lens of a fictional conference, a playful project that gathered ideas about fiction in research through fictional research, and explore the fluid relationship between the real and unreal in HCI.

Demonstrating serena: Chance encounters in the space of ideas

We demonstrate SerenA, a multi-site, pervasive, agent environment that suppers serendipitous discovery in research. SerenA attempts to assist researchers by presenting them with information that they did not know they needed to know about their research.