The room built for serendipity
The design intent
Planning began in 2022, and the room opened in early 2023: community room ISTBX 102, on ASU’s Tempe campus, conceived as a substantial physical reflection of the initiative’s philosophy and vision (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). It was intentionally designed as a third space — not an office, not a classroom, but a place built to promote unprogrammed thinking, connection, and serendipity. People were encouraged to simply use it.
The intent lived in the details: comfortable, configurable, inviting informal seating; bookshelves stocked to encourage serendipitous discovery; playful objects — a “useless box,” a compound pendulum of the kind seen in the Iron Man films; deliberate attention to decor and lighting. And a social design to match the physical one: the room gave people permission to find their own space and not engage, or to engage informally — a place to feel at home rather than a venue to be booked for output (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05).
This was philosophy made architectural. One of our five guiding principles is Catalytic Serendipity — “deeply valuing the transformative nature of serendipitous insights and discoveries that arise from casual and unexpected situations, conversations, and interactions” (Guiding Principles). ISTBX 102 was that principle given a door, chairs, and an open calendar. We state its significance directly: convening — including building the physical conditions for unplanned convening — is a core output of this initiative, not overhead. See Philosophy.
How it was used
Illustrative uses, not an exhaustive list:
- A weekly home for Pizza and a Slice of Future: the class met Thursdays in ISTBX 102 — “the room looks like a lounge,” its syllabus noted — with conversation over pizza as the core learning mechanism (FIS 394 syllabus, Fall 2025; course page at futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu).
- An open room: the room had a public Google Calendar, linked from the footer of every page of the initiative’s site — an open invitation rather than a booking gate (site capture, 2026-08-05).
- An ambient public face: a Vestaboard split-flap display, with a public livestream, became part of the room’s setup shortly after it opened (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05).
Contemporaneous with the room, the initiative also ran its 2022–2023 Tempe meetup series and informal community hangouts (site archive, captured 2026-08-05); the captures do not record the series’ venue, and the room itself opened in early 2023, partway through that series.
How we know it worked
The room’s effectiveness shows up in a steady stream of informal comments from the people who used it — not in any metric (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). That is the evidence pattern our philosophy predicts for a space like this: a room designed for serendipity cannot log its serendipities. Instrumenting casual conversation — sign-in sheets, utilization dashboards, outcome surveys — would have destroyed the very informality that made it work. The informal-comment record is the appropriate form of evidence for this kind of infrastructure, and we treat it as such.
Retirement — of the room, not the practice
ISTBX 102 was retired in 2026 with the initiative’s move to ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management (see Identity). Accurate status matters: the room is not currently active, and what replaces it is not yet determined (elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05). But building third spaces remains part of what we do, the Thunderbird phase’s emphasis on playgrounds, connection, and serendipity carries the practice forward — and the room seeded an ongoing research thread on the importance, design, and use of unprogrammed spaces, in the spirit of Scandinavian traditions where such spaces are protected from output-based programming by policy (active work, elicited from Andrew Maynard, 2026-08-05).
Fuller detail — specific gatherings, specific comments, specific serendipities that can be told publicly — awaits elicitation from Andrew, Sean, and the community members who used the room.
What this evidences: the Philosophy claim that catalytic infrastructure is worth building even when — especially when — its effects are structurally invisible to metrics: a room can be an argument.