The Serendipity Engine

Random Shopper: randomised consumerism

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 16:37:00 +0000

ohmigod. this is genius.

I built Amazon Random Shopper. Every time I run it, I give it a set budget, say $50. It grabs a random word from the Wordnik API, then runs an Amazon search based on that word. It then looks for every paperback book, CD, and DVD in the results list, and buys the first thing that’s under budget. If it found a CD for $10, then the new budget is $40, and it does another random word search and starts all over, continuing until it runs out of money, or it searches a set number of times.

…

What it bought, I won’t know until it comes in the mail.

technologically-generated serendipity!

Shipment 1 (Linguistics and dissonance) arrived 5 days ago.

HT @thommay

"…apps that claim to engineer serendipity seem more likely to do the reverse. Their main..."

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 17:13:19 +0100

“…apps that claim to engineer serendipity seem more likely to do the reverse. Their main offense is not ubiquitous surveillance, but that they stand to destroy surprise and, with it, true serendipity. Rather than enriching our lives with unexpected encounters and genuine strangers, they threaten to take the mystery and the magic out of people we don’t know”

- Messing With Fate

It’s rare that I agree with Andrew Keen, but here he pipped me in an article about digital serendipity solutions, for The Atlantic.

a few interes links on music and serendipitous discovery

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:40:16 +0100

a few interes links on music and serendipitous discovery:

Tuck W Leong’s work is mostly focussed on HCI and Design. He was introduced to me at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme 2012 by Jaz Choi.

The Serendipity Engine has a two-page spread in this...

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:11:00 +0100

The Serendipity Engine has a two-page spread in this month’s Wired UK. Wow!

Social psychologist creates machine to visualise how serendipity works

*Massive* thanks to SE collaborators Kat Jungnickel & Ben Hammersley, to contributors Rupert Fisher, Steve Thompson, Ed Knight and Julien McHardy, and to funders the British Sociological Association, Nominet Trust and Google.

This fantastic shot was taken at Google’s Big Tent event. I was so ill I don’t remember the day at all.

Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:58:22 +0100

Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals:

..after Jonah Lehrer’s sermon at School of Life (and his recently-published book Imagine: How Creativity Works), here’s a report about a psychological scale that measures perseverance, or “grit”.

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M.D. & Kelly, D.R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 92(6): 1087-1101.

Here’s why it’s relevant:

grit, more than self-control or conscientiousness, may set apart the exceptional individuals who [psychologist William] James thought made maximal use of their abilities.

it’s not just about “commitment to a subjectively important activity” (the passion scale by Vallerand et al, 2003 is what the authors of this study reference for this) but about perseverance of effort. like tenacity. like conscientiousness and self-control, and focusses on effort & interest over time. And it’s separate from IQ.

It’s got a good internal validity of [alpha]=0.78.

The word “diligence” leaps out at me.

A few interesting results:

more educated adults were higher in grit than were less educated adults of equal age

…

grit grows with age

…

a strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths

interes.

The serendipity engine printer: she works. SEv2 is on its...

Sat, 12 May 2012 22:14:00 +0100

The serendipity engine printer: she works. SEv2 is on its way.

Arduino-powered. From adafruit.

Brought to life by ben. hoorah!

ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the...

Sat, 12 May 2012 21:45:15 +0100

ensō symbolizes a moment when the mind is free to simply let the body/spirit create

Creativity Test overview, from Indiana University

Sat, 12 May 2012 21:11:11 +0100

Creativity Test overview, from Indiana University:

hmm.

Creativity tests are typically divided into four main components: Divergent thinking, Convergent thinking, Artistic assessments and Self assessments.

it feels rather uncreative to test creativity. but then again, we do like to standardise things, don’t we. solves a lot of problems if we turn it into a number, no?

how relevant are these tests/tasks to different contexts?

The current Master Algorithm for the serendipity engine MK II....

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:07:58 +0100

The current Master Algorithm for the serendipity engine MK II. On my wall of whiteboard.

Ooh! LittleBits! Tonight, after a long 10 days of writing The...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:27:13 +0100

Ooh! LittleBits!

Tonight, after a long 10 days of writing The Book, I’m finally getting down to playing with LittleBits (http://www.littlebits.cc), an open source electronics starter kit that’s literally so simple I can create a teeny vibrating motor within 30s of removing the magnetic components from the box. These little fellas are far more easy to use than the circuits and breadboards Kat and I were trying to wrangle in SEv1.0, and they will power many of the moving and interactive parts in SE2.0.

I’ve only got the starter kit at the moment, but I have many more thingies on order. Very cool project developed by Ayah Bdeir of MIT Media Lab, and recommended to me by David Over at the Royal Geographic Society.

Descriptive Camera

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:09:01 +0100

Descriptive Camera:

I’m drawing together the final (open source) technologies that will be integrated into the serendipity engine v2.0, which will be unveiled next month at Google’s Zeitgeist and Big Tent events here in the UK. (oh boy.. the little bits arrived in findochty yesterday, where i’m finishing my book).

I really like the possibilities of this:

The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

what might it capture that you don’t expect? an exciting potential source of happy accidents.

HT @rooreynolds

How to Be Creative. (o rilly.)

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:11:04 +0100

How to Be Creative. (o rilly.):

Jonah Lehrer weighs/cashes in on the science of serendipity in the Wall Street Journal. A review of the literature, plus steps for Certain Success.

My tuppence:

Skeptics don’t do well in the current climate, when people seek optimistic solutions rather than asking the important questions. REF: the Messianic overtones of TED events, the continued existence of Malcolm Gladwell, the endless stack of “business” books with “How to ROCK at XYZ” after a catchy headline.

I am a skeptic. I don’t feel there’s a one-size-fits-all solution for creativity. Or serendipity.

And that, at its core, is what the serendipity engine is all about.

HT @rooreynolds

"We speak of being “grounded” and having our “feet on the ground” and now was..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:40:20 +0000

“

We speak of being “grounded” and having our “feet on the ground” and now was the time to have some awareness of our feet. We were asked to consider the way our feet feel on the ground, the weight of our body on them and the feel of the ground under them. With no talking suggested, and only concentration on our feet, it made for hard work.

Then we were challenged to just listen. Take in the sounds of nature, with no judgement of the sounds or labelling. We stood by a waterfall which made it a glorious task but also made it easier for the mind to wander…

”

- TreeHugger described how to do a slow walk, reporting back from an organised slow walk with Slow Down London.

Method fodder for the Serendipity Salons Mel and I are planning for festivals around the UK this summer.

"…three things need to be in place for a happy accident to become worthwhile: someone must be..."

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 08:10:00 +0000

“…three things need to be in place for a happy accident to become worthwhile: someone must be obsessed and daring enough to tinker and generate the new ideas, someone must be able to spot the one good idea among a host of useless ones, and someone needs the skill to realize the idea’s full potential.”

- An interpretation of the requirements for serendipitous discovery from - of all places - the perfume world, uncovered whilst reading Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (Viking, 2008; p. 10).

Pleasantly consistent with serenA’s chance, insight and value typology.

Amateur (or professional) perfume makers, I would like to speak with you. Find me on twitter.

Thanks @benhammersley, who gave me the hat tip on the book

"To call a place Paradise you had to have something to back it up!"

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:08:21 +0000

“To call a place Paradise you had to have something to back it up!”

- Mel Woods and I have been talking about situationists and the method of the derive, and bringing it to festivals across the UK this summer to inspire serendipitous encounters in places rich with delight, saturated with magic and ripe for thinking otherwise.

This is a project one of her students, dkdundee, did late last year: A Slow Walk to Paradise.

It’s captured my imagination, particularly when considering different ways of travelling that might inspire people to respond to the environment in new and unexpected ways - a line of enquiry Kat considered in an inspired mobile mobilities workshop that she ran last year in London as part of her postdoc work.

More on the summer serendipity schedule soon.

I recently convened two workshops for the masters students in...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:40:00 +0000

I recently convened two workshops for the masters students in the Media and Communications Department at LSE, where I’m a Visiting Fellow.

It was an opportunity to introduce the making methodology to students as part of their toolkit in research practice, and to explore alternative understandings of “Google” than that which Kat and I have devised in the serendipity engine. Kat spoke with them the day before; this put her theory into practice.

Alison Powell and I asked the students two questions:

What human need does Google fulfill?
What does Google look like?

We had asked them to bring physical examples of personal data, and we provided a treasure trove of curiosities (well, glue guns, rubber bands, glitter and other ephemera).

This is a summary of their Googles. Here is the Flickr set of their pieces.

Group 1 created a sprawling Google universe with a centralised brain that draws in many inputs to produce outputs. They placed special emphasis on the extent to which Google spreads its economic and political power across all of these things, as well as the boundaries that define its power.

Group 2 considered how Google delivers its results from our personal data - integrating one student’s loyalty cards from local shops to international brands - in conjunction with brand power, interconnections and keywords. Theirs was a very commercial observation of the service.

Group 3 considered the geographical and cultural filters that Google considers/implements/restricts, and how these affect what Google thinks we are looking for (and therefore what it delivers) and how far it is able to reach, globally.

Group 4 represented Google as a man - a happy man - through whom our personal data and our queries are analysed and synthesised, and then redelivered into the various media outputs it delivered.

Group 5 considered Google a way of connecting like-minded individuals through search and discovery, and how new connections - between people - increased the weight of the collective understanding of information, thus making it more likely to be served.

Many many thanks to the students of the Masters course for participating in this experiment and for embracing the task, and to Alison for offering the opportunity to extend my understanding of the making method as research practice.

"Strip away the nostalgia and maybe our moments of serendipitous discovery before the Internet are..."

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:40:55 +0000

“Strip away the nostalgia and maybe our moments of serendipitous discovery before the Internet are much more rational than we would like to think.”

- If The Internet Killed Serendipity, It Probably Never Existed Anyway

Happy wanderings

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:21:02 +0000

Happy wanderings:

More on the latest serendipity appearances here.

"Alfred … puts serendipitous recommendations in the palm of a consumer’s hand. Dubbed..."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:29:49 +0000

“Alfred … puts serendipitous recommendations in the palm of a consumer’s hand. Dubbed “Pandora for the real world,” Alfred is a personal robot that can learn users’ tastes when they teach it about their favorite places in the real world.”

- Google + Cleversense = “serendipitous recommendations”. Marissa Mayer is “excited to welcome the CleverSense team to Google” today.

HT @invisiblecomma who says,

I guess they have some serendipity engineers now…

i don’t think this solves the problem. what if it’s rubbish in, rubbish out?

Little Printer

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:24:27 +0000

Little Printer:

from the brains at BERG London.

WANTING.. for Serendipity Engine v2.0 (in production from Jan 2012)

WAITING.. until it’s released