Proposed facets of a serendipitous digital environment

Serendipity is broadly defined as an unexpected and valuable experience prompted by an individual’s interactions with ideas, information, objects, and phenomena; in digital worlds the challenge to date has been in designing and developing a digital environment that is capable of facilitating serendipity. In this poster we present the early stages of the development of a means to measure whether digital environments such as social media sites, search engines, and digital libraries have the potential to facilitate serendipity. Drawing from prior research and the initial results of an expert review, this poster outlines the preliminary facets or sub-dimensions of a serendipitous digital environment (SDE). These facets will be used to develop a scale: _Enables exploration_, _Trigger-rich_, _Enables connections_, _Highlights triggers_, and _Leads to the unexpected_. The results of this research will provide both a source for design elements that may guide the development of digital environments that support serendipity and a tool for developers and researchers to assess the serendipitous nature of digital environments.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe