Redesigning social mechanisms in digital calendars to better support a flexible lifestyle

Abstract

Though lifestyles have become increasingly more flexible in the past few decades with concepts like last-minute bookings and flex working, we still try to plan our lives with a rigid tool: the digital calendar. Calendar42 is a Dutch start-up that strives to re-invent the digital calendar and with that the way people plan their life. Having grown to a team of eleven in its three years of existence, it now offers a platform that intelligently connects their own plans with the plans of other people, organisations and systems surrounding them. By developing a flexible, open platform Calendar42 aims to become an important platform for distribution and consumption of time-related information and put the calendar in the centre of people’s daily life. Purpose Calendar42’s main asset have been around creating intelligent services to support the individual users. As many planning challenges are strongly related to social challenges, Calendar42 wants to gain insight into how to apply their underlying system inside the social context. Existing digital calendars already support several (rigid) social mechanics such as the ability to invite participants to meetings or share availability with others, but do not offer ways to keep up with the continuously changing priorities and new arising opportunities inside this always connected society. In order to design for these social planning mechanisms it’s crucial to understand current flexible social planning mechanisms and explore how these could be translated inside the context of a digital calendar. These social planning mechanisms should fit the strengths and values of Calendar42. Special Methodology The study contains a broad exploration of the main three components of the assignment: calendars, flexible lifestyles and social mechanisms. Within this exploration a combination of literature studies, case studies and context research will be used. The exploration will be used to form design guidelines and directions that will be used in an iterative design process. Findings The polychronic time sense has been found to be a good concept to describe the flexible lifestyle. Its characterised by a loss of social and temporal boundaries, and allows to respond last-minute on continuously changing priorities and opportunities. Fitting planning tools that mix these dynamics with some much needed structure still lack. There is a big opportunity for Calendar42 to support this desired structure by developing a social planning assistant that enables interaction between system and crowd intelligence. Offering social planning mechanisms in which users are supported by the system to coherently plan in groups. For this collaboration to be successful, a high level of translucency is key: people should always be accountable for their actions through a high level of visibility and awareness of the social context. Furthermore, in order to serve a wide range of planning scenarios and group structures, the offered mechanisms should be developed to be open-ended and allow for social self-regulation. Conclusions and recommendations The final solution, Gather, enables groups to shape events inside a conversation with a mix of free-form messages and explicit proposals of event details. The system intelligence supports the users to make relevant proposals leaving the decision making up to the group dynamics. Gather and the design guidelines should offer Calendar42 a good base to develop a successful social planning solution for the current dynamic planning needs.