“Streets and their sidewalks – the main public places of a city – are its most vital organs,” urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961. Without question, city inhabitants depend on public spaces: streets provide opportunities for strolling and conversation; parks grant relief from the confines of static private settings. Beyond these basic affordances, public spaces offer even higher value – the potential for accidental, fortunate discoveries: serendipity.
Public spaces are breeding grounds for serendipity. Urban residents’ otherwise isolated and partitioned lives intersect in squares, streets, bridges and parks. Old friends and strangers collide, exchanging information, creating ideas, establishing awareness and ultimately fostering community. Unplanned fortunes can occur on a personal level too: stumbling upon an alternative path, a beautiful vista or a delicious smell. These seemingly lucky occurrences expand thinking and awareness through delight.
Traditionally, architects and urban planners have held the keys to creating moments of discovery in public spaces.
Consider the Spanish Steps in Rome where crowds of visitors and locals congregate and cross paths. Or even the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, USA, where striking views of landscape and art amaze inhabitants as they traverse the zigzagging path.
In recent years, service designers are also facilitating happenstance moments in public spaces, representing a shift from conventional design, defining new interactions. Many services for connecting people online have recently broadened into the physical public realm. Facebook’s recently added ‘Nearby Friends’ feature notifies users when their friends are nearby, making for easy, impromptu meet-ups. Some services foster discovery through directing the user’s attention to the built environment with information at key moments. A variety of mobile applications including ‘Kolobee’ in Spain, ‘Jalan Jalan’ in Singapore and the Google-owned ‘Field Trip’, alert the user when they are near something interesting.
Such services bring up new questions about design of public spaces. With the continual blurring of the line between digital and physical realms, what qualifies as an entry point into a public space is being debated. For instance, a user might notice a historic building first on her phone because an application prompted her, as opposed to the structure itself actually catching her eye on the street. Perhaps the goal of future designers should be to overlap disciplines for a single user experience.
What if architects and urban planners started collaborating with service designers and interaction designers to strategically engineer precise moments and locations for desired serendipitous experiences? An architect could, for example, selectively direct people to their space only during times of optimal daylight.Or urban planners could suggest interactions that break down segregation and racial divides, enticing users to visit parts of the city they wouldn’t normally venture to, or spark conversations between people who typically do not interact. Uber, for example, has helped residents in underprivileged communities catch rides in areas that regular taxis typically avoid.
For now, services that induce discovery in public spaces are in their infancy and are no match to the truly unaided, serendipitous encounters.
Serendipity is all about the unexpected. The very act of opting into the service negates the randomness of it all, with content being highly curated and tailored to user preferences. As design for serendipity continues to evolve, it will hopefully lead to more public spaces that are designed in collaboration between architects and service designers, helping diversify our interactions, breaking down segregation barriers and creating rich and memorable experiences.
Kolobee unexpectedly reveals secrets about nearby places
The mobile application Kolobee promotes serendipitous interactions by notifying users when they are near a place with unique or hidden history. A user who happens to be within 200 meters of a location in the database receives a notification and can choose whether or not to venture towards the physical place.
Alfonso Aguado and Elio Capella founded Kolobee in 2012. For now, the service is only available in Spain but they hope to expand to other locations soon.
Comments (0)