research keywords
user-experience John Dewey abdicating choice
Mikhail Bakhtin dialogism interactive devices unfinalizability design
serendipity
defamiliarization Victor Shklovsky
Understanding Serendipitous Experiences when Interacting with Personal Digital Content
Serendipity is an enigmatic and elusive concept. That's why there are various definitions for the phenomenon. Serendipity is best known for the role it plays in major discoveries within human endeavours, we encounter in the world as we go about our everyday lives. Here I define srendipity personally meaningful experiences through chance encounters is often viewed as "the meaningful experience of chance encounters".
Serendipity can also be a user-experience (UX) arising through our use of technology. One example is when people interact or consume personal digital content, such as photographs and music through the use of various computational devices.
With photographs, serendipity is reported when people view their digital pictures during random picture slideshows. Random music listening or shuffle listening is perhaps the most popular example whereby serendipity is reported during interactions with digital music.
Our encounters with serendipity it can be pleasant and delightful; and depending on the circumstance may even sparka sense of awe and wonder, leading some to imbue the phenomenon with elements such magic, or fate. This ambiguous and enigmatic quality heightens people’s perception and seduces them into acts of interpretation and reflection. In doing so people draw upon their own history, past experiences, desires, hopes and fears to make sense of the experience.
But despite the HCI community’s strong commitment to supporting UX, in the design of interactive technologies, to date, no work has been carried out to understand this brand of rich and engaging UX. My research primarily speaks to HCI researchers and interaction designers working in the field of UX. It aims to produce a detailed understanding of this serendipity that arises out of people’s interactions with their personal digital content. This includes the character and quality of this serendipity.
My research also presents a detailed picture of people's processes of sense-making, i.e., the way people actively make sense of their encounters with unexpectedness and unpredictability that can potentially lead to serendipitous experiences. To explicate this process, I show just how personal digital content bearing inscriptions are made strange, or defamiliarised by the random presentation. This is because the content is presented out of its usual contexts and associations and now dropped into new contexts, situations, and conditions as well as with other randomly presented content.
When this happens, people naturally try to interpret the disruption, actively and creatively make sense of it. If during the sense-making process results in personally meaningful connections, then an encounter with serendipity may arise.
Contribution:
This understanding will contribute to the current conceptual foundations of user-experience, broadening and enriching our understanding of people's experiences arising from their encounters with technology, in particular richer experiences that are deeply engaging.
This contribution will extend our understanding of the range of experiences that we should be supporting; moving beyond simply supporting the notions of fun and pleasure. This move is akin to the proposal to study enchantment, a similarly rich and engaging experience McCarthy & Wright, et al (2006).
This understanding will also serve to orientate designers and developers who may, through their expertise, be provoked to articulate a stronger design approach towards supporting for serendipity.
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McCarthy, J., Wright, P.C. Wallace, J., and Dearden, A. (2005). The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Vol 10.6 pp. 369-378.
