SEADE Workshop Proposal - The Serendipity Factor: Evaluating the Affordances of Digital Environments

For two decades, research has sought to understand serendipity and how it may be facilitated in digital environments such as information visualizations systems, search systems, and social media. The motivation to support serendipity comes from its association with positive outcomes that range from personal benefits to global rewards. To date, research has made significant headway in defining and mapping the process of serendipity and new tools are emerging to support it. Creative and robust heuristics and methods of evaluation, however, are required to help move the research forward, to ensure that new or enhanced features, functions, or tools are providing affordances as intended. Without sound approaches, we are blind as to what facilitates serendipity and proposed heuristics to aid practitioners are speculative. SEADE (pronounced 'seed') is a one-day workshop that will examine how we balance the tension between diversity and novelty in designing digital environments and subsequently how we evaluate the 'serendipitousness' of those environments. Since 2006, in its earlier iterations as IIiX and HCIR, CHIIR has served as a venue for the discussion of user-centred information interaction in context. CHIIR provides an ideal venue for bringing together researchers from diverse information and computer science communities and beyond working on the problem of providing support for serendipity in digital environments.