Measuring the dimensions of serendipity in digital environments

Unintended but auspicious discoveries have been credited with ground-breaking global advancements in medicine and science. At the same time, less tangible breakthroughs have aided advancements and innovation within organizations and on a much smaller scale, growth and development of individuals in personal and work lives. Yet our knowledge of serendipity primarily comes from our observation of it in the physical, tactile world of science, rather than in conceptual and often non-observable world of social sciences where the discovery may be the unplanned use of a new method that has unintended consequences, the uncovering of a long forgotten cultural gem, or, the chance connection between two disparate ideas that leads to a new theory. These potential outcomes of serendipitous discovery come from interaction with content that is textual, audio or graphic embedded within a system or from exchange with other people. In this research we focus on the former; serendipity in interactive information systems. Notably, current systems may not provide the rich environment necessary to enable serendipity and instead tend to provide planned paths of navigation from one discrete information object to another with the intent of removing the apparent irrelevant content or shielding the user from what the system perceives is not useful to the user.