Note: This is a cross post of “The Curating Lift” on my portfolio.

As part of the 2011 OzCHI 24 hour student design challenge, a group of us banded together to address the competition’s theme; Designing for Serendipity.

The final concept, ‘The Curating Lift’, was a reimagining of the public (and often awkwardly quiet) elevator ride experience to encourage serendipity. This was the result of a collaborative serendipitous design process into the finer aspects of serendipitous human interactions within humanity and technology.

The concept was published in the proceedings of OzCHI 2011 as the winning entry. OzCHI is the Australian branch of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group.

Full Lifty Time thoughts on Black Board

Process

Frantic posts of our shenanigans and process during the 24 hours can be found on our Process Blog! (Read from the bottom-up!)

process snapshots montage

Team

“We are five explorers, fuelled with the passion of web and interaction design, with the singular goal of creating and producing innovative work. We believe that design is about letting your creativity run wild and experiment with the new and outrageous in order to find the right balance between form, function and aesthetics.

We are inspired by the way that design affects our everyday life, learning and understanding that good design is about creating something which is intuitive to interact with, easy to learn and a pleasure to use. We love that design is an ever-changing and evolving process which we are continually excited and amazed to be a part of. “

– Laura Minchella, Mark C Mitchell, Garry Taulu, Danielle Yu and Hanley Weng.

team image

Paper

Minchella, L., Mitchell, M. C., Taulu, G., Weng, H., & Yu, D. (2011). The Lift as Curator : A Serendipitous Design Process. OzCHI 2011 Proceedings.

Abstract

The OzCHI24 student design challenge defined isolated experiences as a problem space that can offer potential for serendipitous encounters by redesigning, rethinking or augmenting the experience. To address this challenge we investigated how to successfully design for serendipity and arrived at a crucial equation required for all serendipitous encounters: curiosity + sagacity = serendipity. Gathered research from our own serendipitous journey combined with user research culminated into our concept: a lift that offers an opportunistic space which promotes serendipitous experiences on a case by case basis.