the serendipity society

Designing augmented reality (AR) systems for ship bridges poses intricate challenges for interaction designers due to the unique complexities involved in working with this novel interaction material in a dynamic and unpredictable environment. The absence of established design precedents and guidelines for AR systems exacerbates these challenges, thereby reflecting a broader need for guidance in navigating the rapidly evolving digital landscape of interaction design. This thesis aims to explore and identify how design complexity can be effectively managed by introducing serendipity into the design process. Employing a research-by-design and research-into-design approach, this study utilises embedded case studies to contextualise design complexity within the specific context of designing AR technology for ship bridges. It develops conceptual frameworks, practical methods, tools, and approaches to illustrate how serendipity mechanisms and qualities can be cultivated and pragmatically integrated into the design process. Further, this research highlights that designing AR systems for ship bridges entails grappling with various complexities, including interconnected systems, unfamiliar environments, and the challenge of assessing efficiency, user experience, and situational awareness in highrisk domains. Limited research and practice in interaction design further emphasise the need for adaptable frameworks and establishment of design precedents. In this thesis, the navigation of design complexity is conceptualised through the deliberate cultivation of serendipity across different aspects of the design process. The case studies provide insights into an effective, pragmatic strategy that can be employed by interaction designers, stakeholders, and users in exploratory, practice-led design. This approach defines design complexity along two dimensions—design requirements and formgiving concerns—to support sensemaking and decision-making in a complex design landscape. Additionally, it conceptualises serendipity mechanisms, values, and qualities, thereby promoting attentiveness to serendipitous cues, recognition of patterns, seizing of opportunities, and creating of conducive conditions for serendipity. The outcomes of the case studies include conceptual frameworks and design exemplars that contribute to the development of design precedents and practical support for interaction designers working in the maritime domain. In addition, this research—conducted through design—also informs research in design by exploring how design complexity in real world cases are navigated and cultivated for serendipitous outcomes in various design processes. As the discipline of interaction design grapples with the challenges posed by novel interaction materials, including issues like unfamiliarity, technical complexity, and novel formgiving qualities, alongside the evolving digital ecosystem, there is a pressing need to establish new strategies for managing design complexity and harnessing the potential of unexpected discoveries. This thesis contributes to the ongoing evolution of interaction design by providing conceptual frameworks, practical tools, and design exemplars that not only describe but also contextualise the cultivation of serendipity within the complexities of real-world design scenarios, thereby empowering interaction designers to navigate the uncharted territories of emerging interaction materials and the ever expanding digital landscape.

This research aims to explore and understand the nature of serendipity within online marketplaces (i.e. e-commerce serendipity). The motivation for setting this aim stems from a recognised misalignment between the practical applications and theoretical explorations of e-commerce serendipity. E-commerce consumers and practitioners acknowledge the practical value of serendipity. However, they lack a strong theoretical foundation to fully benefit from this phenomenon. In contrast, serendipity- focused studies, especially within information science, have not focused on e-commerce serendipity before and doubted the feasibility of consciously design serendipity. Thus, these studies have resulted in insufficient theoretical support for consumers and practitioners. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, this research adopts a participant-centric narrative approach. This approach aims to contribute to creating more consumer-friendly online marketplaces and to deepen the understanding of serendipity. Participants were prioritised as the main contributors, sharing their experiences and perceptions of e-commerce serendipity through storytelling. Thirty-two Chinese online consumers took part in the research, contributing a total of 123 real-life stories. All these stories were collaboratively analysed with the participants, ensuring a faithful portrayal of e-commerce serendipity as experienced by the consumers themselves. The findings reveal that e-commerce serendipity is an artificially facilitated unplanned experience, jointly shaped by consumers and online platforms along with their designers. Being an artificial serendipity, e-commerce serendipity is characterised by its expectedness, thrillingness, and varied outcomes. Three routes were presented for consumers to experience e-commerce serendipity: coincidence, unexpected discovery, encountering. These routes differed via the varying interaction patterns between serendipitists and third parties under different conditions. The findings regarding e- commerce serendipity as a form of artificial serendipity have significant implications for both research and practice. Theoretically, this research contributes to serendipity-focused studies, particularly in the field of information science. It enhances the current understanding of serendipity and suggests that serendipity- focused research should embrace the concept of serendipity by design. This involves expanding beyond the narrow research scope and definitions that currently dominate the research context, offering a broader and more inclusive perspective. Practically, this thesis contributes to the fostering of mutually beneficial artificial serendipity in online marketplaces. This involves e-commerce practitioners listening attentively to consumers’ voices and for consumers to enhance their digital literacy. Beyond these directly related areas, the research further contributes to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies due to its choice of research context. It provides insights into how better to design recommender systems and create a harmonious online ecosystem.

This thesis is my reflection about my experiences of researching a participatory culture. It began as a traditional research project into peer learning, evolved into a type of participatory research, and has ended up going beyond that as I found myself writing myself into the story and including autoethnographical elements in the final version. The subject of this research is an open, online community called CLMOOC (Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration), which I have belonged to for the last six years, and my focus is to investigate how learning can occur in a participatory culture such as CLMOOC and how, it its turn, a vibrant learning community can emerge from a summer CPD course and become a self-sustaining entity. I use the literature about connected learning, constructionism and participatory cultures in order to understand the theoretical framework that CLMOOC is built on, and use socio-cultural models of Community of Practice (CoP) and affinity spaces in order to understand its structure. Ultimately, I reject both of these as being problematic, though I conclude that the construct of an affinity space is in many ways a better fit. I consider the design of the original MOOC by looking at the literature from the original designers and show how their clever design overcomes many of the issues with other open learning spaces (such as MOOCs) and how the structures they put in place allow a tightly-connected participatory culture to emerge and thrive. I use a variety of methods in order to investigate CLMOOC. Social Network Analysis helps me to analyse the tight-knit community and thematic analyses highlight the beliefs and values that members share. As my thesis is that CLMOOC is a culture of participatory learning, I also set out a series of vignettes to ascertain what the practices are in CLMOOC, and to see how they align with the beliefs and values of the community. I conclude that CLMOOC is, indeed, a participatory culture based on the principles of connected learning, and its practices can be understood as being remix and bricolage. I close by presenting a series of reflective questions for educators who are interested in developing meaningful learning experiences for students in higher education, and offering some tentative suggestions for implementation.

Researchers seeking relevant data across disciplines confront the challenge of navigating technical descriptions. How can curation support the serendipitous discovery of related research data? Everyday spaces like bookshelves are designed to support browsing and exploration by placing similar resources closer together. Space and time are foundational ordering relations for knowledge organization. I ask how this ordering, which is well-established in the geographic context, can be translated to locate and organize research data in abstract topic spaces. This dissertation develops methods for making the latent topics of research metadata explicit. These methods produce spatial configurations where related research topics are co-located in neighborhoods. This has the potential to support serendipitous discovery by offering researchers ways to discover related data. I test this notion in three studies that develop topic spaces for research data curation. The first part of this dissertation in Chapter 2 focuses on supporting research data discovery with a common terminology. I develop a crosscutting base vocabulary of geospatial topics to help users discover related government data in a ubiquitous open civic data platform. Semantic annotation expands search terms by mapping users’ vernacular onto the language of metadata. In the second part of this dissertation, I shift away from addressing terminological search to supporting spatial curation by developing topic spaces. In Chapter 3, I develop two kinds of topic spaces for curating research theses and dissertations: landscapes and networks. I use topic modeling to determine the latent semantic similarity of research metadata and then produce topic spaces from these using spatialization techniques. In Chapter 4, I spatialize an institute’s multidisciplinary body of research, producing topic maps at two distinct levels of detail. Emerging spatial patterns, like centrality and proximity, support high-level narratives about cross-disciplinary research activities that complement the quantitative metrics currently cited in reviews of institutional research. Together, these three studies demonstrate strategies for developing topic spaces in which diverse, yet related, multidisciplinary research data are curated. Future research will extend these methods by tracing the impact of specific curatorial actions contributing to research data discovery and reuse.

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