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.

Personal artifact ecologies in the context of mobile knowledge workers

“…Another stream of research inspired by the ecological perspective explores interactions among physical devices and digital artifacts in an "artifact ecology" (e.g., Bødker et al, 2016;Dittmar & Dardar, 2015;Erkut & Serafin, 2016;Stolterman et al, 2013;Vasiliou et al, 2015). The term is used to embrace the ways in which users, as individuals or collectives, interact with multiple technologies, applications, and devices, appropriating different constellations for different purposes (Bødker & Klokmose, 2012;Coughlan et al, 2012;Jung et al, 2008).…”

“…This analytical attention to interdependencies between activities and technologies can be considered an instance of what Monteiro and colleagues (2012) call the 'here and now' focus of CSCW research (p. 582), and it may overshadow broader contextual examinations. In representing a web of activities, some artifact ecology research has included aspects of context, such as personal (e.g., Dittmar & Dardar, 2015;Stolterman et al, 2013) or collaborative dimensions (e.g., Houben et al, 2013;Oleksik, Milic-Frayling, & Jones, 2012) of users' activities. We extend this work by integrating multiple layers of the context within which activities are supported by artifact ecologies, and thus offer a more nuanced understanding of work context and its influence on how artifact ecologies support work activities.…”

Digital calendars for flexible organizational routines

“…Nonetheless, the advent of Web 2.0 and the supporting standards and technologies (i.e. restful APIs) create further opportunities for improving the scope of digital calendars, thus making them more appropriate for tasks which have been traditionally underserved (Dittmar and Dardar, 2015) or are more complex as they engage routines across social and material settings (Bødker and Grönvall, 2013).…”

“…Our point of departure is that OCS offer variable support for Palen's calendaring activities (Dittmar and Dardar, 2015) while lacking in affordances that would expand their capability for distributed collaborative work (Masli et al, 2011;Mennicken et al, 2014;Buzzo and Merendino, 2015). Specifically, OCS appear to be strong enough at facilitating temporal orientation (by supporting multiple views, i.e.…”

System-of-Systems Design Thinking on Behavior

“…Once becoming digital they have been connected to other systems, like room and meeting management systems, even though there exist diverse personal ecologies of calendar artifacts. As Dittmar et al [1] could show "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". Such findings indicate that design of these artefacts need to be reconsidered for the sake of their applicability and social acceptance once being embodied in digital infrastructures.…”