Greg Lindsay's Blog

June 21, 2014  |  permalink

Meet the Serendipity Engine

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I’m proud to announce Katrina Szabo and I are runners-up in the inaugural Space Forward Ideas Competition to imagine the future of the workplace. Our entry was titled “Serendipity Engine,” and you can read about the concept below, as well as download Katrina’s design of the space in PDF form at the bottom.

Welcome to the Serendipity Engine, a workspace dedicated to the discovery of people, ideas, and opportunities – one made possible by a unique confluence of place and technology. It covers the entire social spectrum of work, from a lounge and yoga studio for meeting coworkers, to an auditorium for classes, to locked rooms for total concentration. And it’s open to anyone willing to share their goals, skills and time when they’re present.

But what sets it apart from even the best-designed offices is the Engine itself – an iPhone and Android app talking constantly to the hundreds of Apple iBeacon sensors embedded throughout the space. These sensors note members’ movements, behavior, and proximity to others, using this data to better understand both how the space is used and who’s using it. It’s more than an office – it’s a professional social network overlaid onto real space, in real time.

Given this information along with members’ histories and profiles, the Engine can intervene as well as listen. Coworkers not only decide where they want to work each day, but whom they want to work with – people’s locations are logged by the system. And even if they don’t know their future mentors, co-founders, or funders are present – the Engine is happy to make the introductions.

The hope is to unlock more value from what makes the best workplaces so great – new connections between smart coworkers who have all the room they need to think. All they need is a little serendipity to strike.

Layout of the Serendipity Engine.

What is the Serendipity Engine?

 

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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