Serendipity and Paper-Prototype #2

Trying to find a valid need for our project we started searching about employees needs. after reading about "The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace" and "Engineering Serendipity we decided to focus on creating serendipity as the need to our product.

What is serendipity?

“SERENDIPITY” : the importance of unexpected connections.

Serendipity Is the New Synergy at the workplace. Companies aren't leaving serendipity to chance, but rather thinking up new ways to encourage interactions among employees who normally don't work with each other. The hope is that these casual face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie.

Some companies are becoming more sophisticated in their efforts to encourage serendipitous encounters between employees, with some making their offices more compact and others installing conversation starters such as games and puzzles near elevators and other high-traffic areas.

THE GOAL: to nurture “serendipitous interaction” between their staff to produce spontaneous interactions

THE STRATEGY:It seems to be impossible to engineer the truly valuable interactions and collisions. However, the chances for serendipity can be boosted by arranging its necessary preconditions.

An interesting quantitative aspect of serendipity: in average, people make up one third of the participants of a serendipity story. The remaining parts are deemed to be either information or physical objects. This suggests to not just expose oneself to diverse people, but also to various information sources and novel physical environments for serendipity to occur.

Why do we need to create serendipity in the workplace?

Almost 40 years ago, Thomas J. Allen, a professor of management and engineering at M.I.T., found that colleagues who are out of sight are frequently out of mind — we are four times as likely to communicate regularly with someone sitting six feet away from us as we are with someone 60 feet away, and almost never with colleagues in separate buildings or floors.

OUR IDEA FOR SERENDIPITY:

The product we thought about is designed to create casual interactions between employees, based on the Minimal Group Paradigm which associated with Tajfel and Turner's (1979, 1986) social identity theory. According to the paradigm it takes minimal conditions to create an in group. Social psychological research has shown that humans are inclined to separate into groups and form identities based on group membership. Once part of a group, members tend to evaluate in-group members positively. Our product is meant to divide co-workers into groups by their interest. The workers will be presented to a question with 4 answer, each answer has its own color that will be reflected in the employees special bracelet according to their answer. Our assumption that this will be enough to create new in-groups that will change every few days according to the question.

The prototype:

The basic idea: