Personal ecologies of calendar artifacts

Abstract

The use of calendars for work and personal activities has been widely investigated for decades and the term calendar work, coined by Palen (CHI 17-24,1999), refers to the many ways people employ and interact with calendars. Previous research has focused on calendar usage in specific domains or on the differences between paper and digital calendars. The current paper is positioned somewhat differently by exploring calendars as object in personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. In such personal calendar ecologies, the users, their tasks, their practices, and the calendar artifacts adapt and evolve together. In addition, individual users are typically engaged in various activities in specific contexts (realms) that are established and maintained by groups of people, supporting the overarching culture of these realms. As such, the web of common practices, activities and tasks, as well as the calendar artifacts shape the individual calendar work. To our knowledge, this article is the first study that investigates diverse personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. To this end we collected detailed user data with (a) exploratory interviews and (b) the Day-Reconstruction Method. The results indicate that the changing demands in daily life, the availability of new tools, and the participants’ knowledge about the costs and benefits of their calendar work and about the consequences of potential failures influence their tendency to explore and possibly integrate new calendar artifacts and appear implicated in the deliberate non-use of new technology. It appears that paper and digital calendar artifacts continue to co-exist. The results indicate an existing ‘appointment culture’ with a high demand of precisely scheduled episodes, and the importance of calendar artifacts for maintaining work and personal relationships in the light of the travel and new technologies for communication.