Overcoming the Paradox of Artificial Serendipity

Annelien Smets
24 jun
6 minuten om te lezen

Bijgewerkt op: 27 jun

Serendipity has become a topical concern across design, research, and public discourse, but the term often conceals more than it reveals. In this article, I provide an overview of our research on how to unpack the concept and explore what it means to intentionally design for, enable, and evaluate serendipity in digital systems.

Serendipity is all around. From music streaming services and public service algorithms to news recommenders, social media feeds, and academic panels; the term keeps showing up. It beholds surprise, diversity, discovery, or delight. Designers want to build it, researchers want to measure it, and public discourse is increasingly calling for it.

But what we rarely admit: everyone seems to mean something different.

This article is a call for clarity. If we want serendipity to be more than a feel-good feature or a vague value, we need to ask sharper questions. What kind of serendipity are we talking about? For whom? And why?

Rather than treating serendipity as a single, fixed concept, I propose breaking it down into three interconnected dimensions:

Intentions: the motivations or objectives behind why designers, developers, or institutions aim to foster serendipity in digital systems.
Affordances: the structures of a system that shape how serendipity can emerge, such as interface elements, content organization, and navigational pathways.
Experiences: the user’s situated and subjective interpretation of an encounter as serendipitous, influenced by personal context, timing, and expectations.

Smets, A. (2025). Intended, Afforded, and Experienced Serendipity.

Importantly, these are not isolated lenses, but deeply entangled aspects of how serendipity is configured, enabled, and experienced. By examining all three, we can better understand how different actors design for, interpret, or even instrumentalize the notion of serendipity.

Why? Serendipity is rarely 'just' that

We often take it for granted, but why design for serendipity in the first place? Serendipity is typically framed as something we all seem to want more of in (digital) environments, but the reasons behind designing for it vary widely. In my research, I identified four distinct intentions for designing for serendipity:

Serendipity as ideal: the designer values the valuable outcome recognized by the user. This reflects an altruistic intent, designing with the goal to enrich individual users’ knowledge, creativity, or perspective (e.g., in libraries or education).
Serendipity as common good: the designer is motivated not by the individual benefit, but by the societal impact resulting from many individuals experiencing serendipity—for instance, to support democratic reflection or cultural cohesion.
Serendipity as mediator: the designer values the consequence of the user experiencing serendipity, such as increased satisfaction or commercial return. The serendipitous experience is instrumental in achieving a separate objective.
Serendipity as feature: the designer deems serendipity essential for the functioning of the environment: it is part of the core design proposition. The user seeks out the environment because of the promise of experiencing serendipity (e.g., co-working spaces, personalized discovery tools).

These intents do need to be made explicit. If we don’t clearly articulate why we are designing for serendipity, then efforts to build systems or evaluate their impact risk becoming directionless. After all, how can we meaningfully design for or evaluate serendipity if we don’t know what purpose it’s meant to serve? Making these design intents explicit is essential, not just for transparency, but to ensure that the systems we build are actually aligned with the kinds of outcomes we care about. Moreover, it also allows us to build cumulative knowledge about what serendipity means and how it functions in different contexts.

How? Serendipity beyond the algorithm

Wait: how can you even design serendipity, that's a paradox, right?

Indeed, you cannot design serendipity itself, but you can design for the conditions that make it more likely to occur. And crucially, the design interventions that shape serendipity don’t just relate to algorithms, it’s shaped just as much by the interface, the content structure, and the pathways users could follow. So, if we care about designing for serendipity, we need to look beyond the algorithm.

We proposed a feature repository that identifies which elements like content metadata, navigation structure, and interface layout can make serendipitous encounters more likely. Inspired by Lennart Björneborn's affordances work, we focused on three key affordances:

Diversifiability: does the system enable access to diverse, heterogeneous content?
Traversability: does the system enable multiple, flexible pathways through its structure or content?
Sensoriability: does the system provide cues (visual, textual, etc.) that allow for contrast, curiosity, or exploration?

Designing for serendipity, then, becomes less about a clever algorithm and more about the broader configuration of the digital environment.

Take a closer look at our IntRS (2022) publication to learn how features like autocomplete or global navigation (and many more!) may afford serendipity.

💡 Looking for ways to design for serendipity? Serendipity Engine is soon releasing a hands-on design toolkit!

What? Serendipity is a user experience

Ultimately, serendipity is a user experience. In our most recent empirical study, we explored how users recognize and make sense of serendipitous encounters. We found that experienced serendipity exists in many flavors, but three key conditions must be present for an experience to be recognized as serendipitous:

Fortuitous: the user’s experience must involve an unintentional encounter with content that is either difficult-to-find, unexpected, or uncovers a subconscious interest.
Refreshing: the user’s experience must involve encountering content that is either novel, unusual, or reignites a past interest through taste reincarnation.
Enriching: the user's experience must be intriguing, inspiring, impactful, relevant, or resonating, while none can be negative.

And importantly: what feels serendipitous to one person might feel irrelevant or disruptive to another. System designers need to account for this variability; not just in how serendipity is experienced, but also in how systems shape the potential for such experiences. Designing for serendipity, if done carelessly, can lead to unintended consequences: users may be distracted, overwhelmed, or nudged away from their goals. Thinking about how to design for serendipity means reflecting not only on your intentions, but also on how these might translate into meaningful, and contextually appropriate, user experiences.

What does this all mean?

If you're designing for serendipity, reflect first on your intentions: What kind of encounters do you want to make possible, and why? Then consider what affordance features your system needs to support those goals, and how this might actually be experienced by users, both in intended ways and through unintended consequences.

If you're studying or measuring serendipity, avoid overgeneralizations. Be clear about which dimension you're investigating and what they mean: intentions, affordances, or experiences. This kind of differentiation helps prevent conceptual ambiguity and keeps us focused on the purposes, structures, or experiences.

Concretely, here are three critical questions to ask:

What is the objective of the design for serendipity, and for whom? Clarify whose goals are being prioritized, and what kinds of value you hope to generate through serendipitous encounters.
What specifies experienced serendipity in this context, and what are potential negative outcomes? Make sure your definition is context-aware and includes possible downsides, like distraction or misalignment with user goals.
How can we put this into practice? What specific design interventions can you do, and how will you evaluate if they succeed? Make sure to consider how intentions, affordances, and experiences continuously shape and constrain one another. Understanding serendipity means attending to this dynamic interplay.