I've been struggling to find time to blog, and struggling to find time to respond to all the fascinating emails I get. Then tonight, as I was replying to an email, I found myself writing something that felt like a blog post. Maybe I should try combining the two more often?

What follows is a response to an email from JB, someone I've met a couple of times in serendipitous circumstances. Now, he writes with a question that sparks all kinds of thoughts and connections for me: "I wonder what it would mean to create a serendipity space in the city?" Here is my reply.

I love serendipity.

That's what I loved about Twitter in the first few months of 2009, which was my golden period with it - it seemed like a serendipity engine that accelerated the rate of fascinating random encounters I was having in First Life.

When I was eighteen, I set off around Europe for ten months, busking and hitchhiking. I sometimes think people should be sent hitchhiking as a kind of National Service, so that they learn about the kindness of strangers, and the joy of serendipity. So many people go a long way into life, without having much experience of throwing themselves on to chance, instead of trying to control things. Sooner or later, chance catches up with us all, of course, which is why people often become sadder and kinder with age. 

But I would like to live in a world where more people had the experience of embracing chance. I sometimes think we should have Family Improvisation clinics, as well as Family Planning clinics.

A lot of the stuff we did with the Pick Me Up email magazine was about making it easier for strangers to talk to each other in public. One time, Charlie Davies (who started PMU) had a dream that there were air stewards and stewardesses on the tube. So he got three friends together, they made costumes, and they went out one morning giving out cups of tea and performing safety instructions in the carriages. They said at first it felt like performance art, but as the morning went on they were spending more and more of the time just getting into interesting conversations with people.

Is it easier to talk to someone in a costume (a clown, a policeman) than someone whose clothes are inscrutable, or studiedly normal? Once upon a time, you could tell what someone did by their clothes. Did that make the streets more legible? Was that part of the kind of lively public spaces Richard Sennett writes about in 'The Fall of Public Man'? We have forgotten how to talk to each other without this requiring intimacy, he says. Once upon a time, audiences didn't sit in silence, and shopping involved interactions with people to find out or negotiate the price, rather than scanning barcodes.

Slavoj Zizek says somewhere that our liberal Western concept of human rights boils down to the right to be left alone. Something similar applies to technologies. How many of our technologies are technologies of isolation? 

Brian Eno says somewhere that he can't listen to music through headphones, because music doesn't make sense without a space in which he is hearing it. Headphones are a technology of isolation. What if we set out to design technologies of entanglement, instead?

Ivan Illich says somewhere that one of the weirdest things about modern life is how many of the words that are addressed to us come from people we will never meet. Until not long ago, we were spoken to by people who were there in the flesh. Very quickly, we have become used to living in a world where we are constantly spoken to by people to whom we cannot speak back.

Richard Sennett (him again) defines a "workshop" as a productive environment in which power is handled face-to-face. It is not that there is no hierarchy, but that there is no faceless power. 

I've found myself talking to people about conversational tools, lately. Twitter is a conversational tool, to me. Blogs and email, not so much, because they come in paragraphs. And through Twitter, my life has become entangled with all kinds of wonderful people, many of whom I go on to meet in the flesh.

So, I wonder, in answer to your question, could we create conversational tools for serendipity in cities? (And wouldn't these be very much like Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality'?) 

The People Speak's Talkaoke table is a conversational tool, and so is the Mindapples Tree. Here it is at Brixton Village, when we were working there with Space Makers a couple of years ago:

How could we play with public space to make more of these? 

My friend Pamela once told me she'd like to create Safe Smiling Zones - where people have permission to smile at strangers - and paint them onto the pavement.

What else could we do?