Discovery is never by chance: designing for (un)serendipity

ABSTRACT

Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by 'association-hunting' agents. We propose considering not only the inventor's role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor's perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately.

REFERENCES

• 1: Adomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A. Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Knowledge and Data Engineering. 17(6) (2005). 734--749.
• 2: André, P., Teevan, J., & Dumais, S. T. From x-rays to silly putty via Uranus: serendipity and its role in web search. Proc CHI '09. 2033--2036.
• 3: Beale, R. Supporting serendipity: Using ambient intelligence to augment user exploration for data mining and web browsing. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007).
• 4: Burke, R. Hybrid recommender systems: survey and experiments. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. 12(4) (2002) 331--370.
• 5: Campos, J., & Figueiredo, A. D. Searching the unsearchable: Inducing serendipitous insights. In R. Weber, & C. G. von Wangenheim (Eds.), Case-based reasoning: Workshop program at ICCBR-2001. http://tinyurl.com/c47c6a
• 6: Comroe, J. H. Retrospectroscope. Insights into Medical Discovery. Menlo Park, CA: Von Gehr Press p. 177. 1977.
• 7: Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Sawyer, K. Creative insight: The social dimension of a solitary moment. In R. J. Sternberg & J. E. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of insight 329--363. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1995.
• 8: De Bono. E. Lateral Thinking. Penguin Books. 1990.
• 9: De Bruijn, O. & Spence, R. A new framework for theory-based interaction design applied to serendipitous information retrieval, ACM TOCHI 15,1 (2008), 1--38.
• 10: Delgadillo, R & Lynch, B. P. Future historians; their quest for information, College & Research Libraries, Vol 60,(1999) 245--259.
• 11: Dix, A. Deconstructing experience: pulling crackers apart. In Funology: From Usability To Enjoyment, M. A. Blythe, K. Overbeeke, A. F. Monk, and P. C. Wright, Eds. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 165--178. 2004.
• 12: Erdelez, S. Information encountering: It's more than just bumping into information, Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 25,3(1999) 25--29.
• 13: Erdelez, S. Investigation of information encountering in the controlled research environment, Information Processing and Management 40,6 (2004), 1013--1025.
• 14: Ford, N. Information retrieval and creativity: towards support for the original thinker. Journal of Documentation, 55(5), 1999.
• 15: Foster, A. & Ford, N. Serendipity and information seeking: An empirical study, J. Documentation 59,3 (2003) 321--340.
• 16: Gladwell, M. Outliers: The story of success. Little, Brown, and Company. 2008.
• 17: Herlocker, J. L., Konstan, J. A., Terveen, L. G. & Riedl, J. T. Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems, ACM TOIS 22, 1 (2004), 5--53.
• 18: Hölldobler, M. & Wilson, E. The superorganism: the beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies. W.W. Norton. 2008.
• 19: Kohn, A. Fortune or failure: missed opportunities and chance discoveries. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 1989.
• 20: Lieberman, H. Letizia: An Agent that Assists Web Browsing, Proc. of IJCAI 95.
• 21: Marchionini, G., Shneiderman, B. Finding facts vs. browsing knowledge in hypertext systems. IEEE Computer, 21, 1, (1988) 70--80.
• 22: Mathews, H. & Brotchie, A. Oulipo compendium. Atlas Press, 1998.
• 23: Meyers, M. A. Glen W. Hartman Lecture. Science, creativity, and serendipity. American Journal of Roentgenology, Vol 165, (1995) 755--764.
• 24: Resnick, P. & Varian, H. R. Recommender systems. Commun. ACM 40, 3 (Mar. 1997), 56--58.
• 25: Rice, R. E., McCreadie, M. M., & Change, S. L. Accessing and browsing information and communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2001.
• 26: Roberts, R. M. Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science. New York: Wiley VCH. 1989.
• 27: Robinson, A. G., Stern, S. Corporate creativity: how innovation and improvement actually happen. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. 1998.
• 28: Runco, M. A., Pritzker, S. R. Encyclopedia of creativity. Elsevier 1999.
• 29: Russ, S. W. Affect and Creativity: The role of affect and play in the creative process. Lawrence Erlbaum 1983.
• 30: Sarwar, B., Karypis, G., Konstan, J. & Reidl, J. Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms, Proc WWW '01, 285--295.
• 31: Seifert, C,. Meyer, D., Davidson, N., Patalano, A., & Yaniv, I. Demystification of cognitive insight, In R. J. Sternberh and J. E. Davidson (eds), The nature of insight. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1995.
• 32: Shen, X., Tan, B. & Zhai, C. Implicit user modeling for personalized search, Proc CIKM'05 824--831.
• 33: Simonton, D. K. Foresight in Insight? A Darwininan Answer. In: Sternberg, R. J., Davidson, J. E. (eds.): The Nature of Insight. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1995.
• 34: Spink, A., Greisdorf, H. & Bateman, J. From highly relevant to not relevant: Examining different regions of relevance, IP&M 34, 5 (1998), 599--621.
• 35: Swanson, D. R. & Smalheiser, N. R. Implicit text linkages between Medline records: Using Arrowsmith as an aid to scientific discovery. Library Trends, 48, (1999) 48--59.
• 36: Swanson, D. R. Complementary structures in disjoint science literatures. Proc SIGIR '91. 280--289.
• 37: Teevan, J., Dumais, S. T. & Horvitz, E. Beyond the commons: on the value of personalizing Web search. Proc PIA'05, 84--92.
• 38: Toms, E. Serendipitous information retrieval, Proc of the First DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on Information Seeking, Searching and Querying in Digital Libraries, 2000.
• 39: Tsuda, S., Zauner, K. P. & Gunji, Y. P. Robot control with biological cells. BioSystems, 87(2007) 215--223.
• 40: Van Andel, P. Anatomy of the Unsought Finding. Serendipity: Origin, history, domains, traditions, appearances, patterns and programmability, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45, 2 (1994), 631--648.
• 41: Vandenburg, B. Play, problem-solving and creativity. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 9 (1980), 49--68
• 42: Wilson, M. L. & schraefel, m.c. EPrintCast - A Document Repository Podcast. In: The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories, 2008.
• 43: Wood, A., Drew, N., Beale, R., Hendley, B. HyperSpace: Web Browing with Visualization, Proc. WWW'95, 21--25.
• 44: Yang, B. & Jeh, G. Retroactive answering of search queries. In WWW '06. 457--466
• 45: Ziegler, C., McNee, S. M., Konstan, J. A. & Lausen, G. Improving recommendation lists through topic diversification, Proc. WWW '05. 22--32.
• 46: Zollinger, H. Color chemistry: syntheses, properties, and applications of organic dyes and pigments. New York: Wiley VCH, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.m MISCELLANEOUS

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
creativity, design suggestions, insight, serendipity, survey