Brett Binst

Brett Binst currently works on the ‘Serendipity Engine’ project as a PhD student. In this project, he studies serendipity in urban recommender systems. More specifically, he studies why system providers would design for serendipity, how they can design for it (through an affordances perspective) and the experience of serendipity in users of these urban recommender systems. 

Brett Binst acquired a Bachelor of science in Psychology at the VUB in 2020. Next, he completed his Master’s degree in Sociology in 2022. His masterthesis was a study into the preconditions and inequality of having an opinion about AI, inspired on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework laid out in La Distinction. Before starting on the Serendipity Engine project, he worked on the Barometer project, on behalf of the Koning Boudewijn Foundation in which he mainly performed quantitative analyses, comparing the labour market situation of migrants and natives.