Explore a new book discovery experience in the public library

Nowadays, a public library is no longer a place just for the collection of books. It has offered multiple functions to take the responsibility of being a public cultural institution for all citizens. However, in the Netherlands, libraries are losing their members, especially young adults. With the development of technology, a public library is...

Wa/ondering with data - or, Responsibly measuring socio-technical serendipity in the urban environment

Current trends in serendipity research and collaborative ethics point to the importance of cultivating bottom-up approaches to designing for datafication in urban centers. The focus on pattern recognition in big scale data analysis, combined with an exponential growth in and infrastructural support of ubiquitous information and communication...

Luck as a challenge for the responsible governance of science and technology

From the early days of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), luck has played the role of an antagonist to responsibility: responsible innovation is, in part, an effort to control for the possible negative effects of luck–the chance that chance itself will take our technologies in directions that we would rather avoid. If we are to have...

Scientists’ views on (moral) luck

Scientific discoveries are often to some degree influenced by luck. Whether luck’s influence is at odds with common-sense intuitions about responsibility, is the central concern of the philosophical debate about moral luck. Do scientists acknowledge that luck plays a role in their work and–if so–do they consider it morally problematic? The...

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

‘Serendipity’ is a category used to describe discoveries in science that occur at the intersection of chance and wisdom. In this paper, I argue for understanding serendipity in science as an emergent property of scientific discovery, describing an oblique relationship between the outcome of a discovery process and the intentions that drove it...

Did Alexander Fleming deserve the Nobel Prize?

Penicillin is a serendipitous discovery par excellence. But, what does this say about Alexander Fleming’s praiseworthiness? Clearly, Fleming would not have received the Nobel Prize, had not a mould accidently entered his laboratory. This seems paradoxical, since it was beyond his control. The present article will first discuss Fleming’s...

Bursting Filter Bubbles With Serendipity

When talking about personalization online, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said "it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." This level of personalized filtering of content has worried academics and activists. Many argue that users will be trapped in a so-called "Filter...