Serendipity Cards

A practical card set for designers, facilitators, educators, and changemakers who want to design environments that make serendipitous events more likely.

The Serendipity Cards translate the idea of designing for serendipity into an accessible tool for workshops, reflection, and ideation. They help teams explore how people might unexpectedly discover ideas, information, people, or opportunities. The cards are rooted in research on affordances for serendipity: the idea that you cannot force serendipity, but you can design environments that make it more likely to happen. The cards help turn that idea into action.

What can you use the cards for?

The cards are designed to support exploration, conversation, and idea generation. They can be used to:

spark new ideas on how to design for serendipity
reflect on an existing concept or environment
support design workshops, brainstorming sessions, strategy work, and education

They are open enough to inspire discussion, but structured enough to help teams move from reflection to concrete directions.

What is in the set?

The card set includes 37 cards, including:

principle cards
concrete examples
reflection cards
instruction cards

Each card is designed to be easy to use in practice: compact, and conversation-oriented. The examples help people connect the principles to their own context and think analogically across domains.

Orgainze your own workshop on designing for serendipity

The Serendipity Cards work across different contexts. They can be used in digital, physical, social, and organizational environments. They have already been applied in settings such as online platforms, urban neighborhoods, and education: from rethinking library websites, to strengthening social cohesion in local communities, to helping students critically reflect on serendipity in digital applications.

You can download the workshop instructions in English or Dutch.

We’d also love to hear how you’ve used them in your own practice.

Serendipity Cards

The Serendipity Cards are available in Dutch or English through the VUB webshop.

The card set is developed as part of the Serendipity Engine research project, supported by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). The concept is based on research by Annelien Smets at imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and builds on academic work on affordances for serendipity. The card set was developed with support from Knowledge Centre Data & Society and designed by Stardust.

© 2026 VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL. All rights reserved.

Google Sites

Report abuse