Calendars

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about calendars. As a busy family of four with two young kids, we have a lot of appointments, responsibilities, and events to keep track of. Over the years, I’ve tried planners, dry-erase boards, an army of post-it notes, shared Google calendars, iCal, and my favorite: frantic text messages to my husband asking if he’s picking up our daughters—and just about every other system in between.

About a year ago, I noticed my sister-in-law’s digital wall calendar, which I learned later was a Skylight. She is a mom of four kids, ranging in age from 5 to 14, so it made sense that she’d have this. But several things about it bothered me from a design perspective.

The first—it was tiny. It was a 10” screen. For a family of six, this just didn’t seem helpful enough from an “at a glance” perspective.

Second—the screen was so glaringly bright in her darker color-drenched kitchen. I’m sure there existed a brightness setting that could be adjusted… but this misses the point.

Third—it had a ridiculously short power cord that meant it needed to be mounted low on the wall. Which is considerate of the kids who casually consult it, but the device is more so a guiding light for the parents, who are both quite tall. This seemed to be something they worked around, but this would drive me nuts.

Suffice to say—this calendar stuck in my mind. It’s been more than a year since I first saw it, and I still think of it almost every day.

I think about how the problem is really the screen. Sure, they’ve iterated to treat the screen like the popular Samsung Frame TV, with interchangeable frames to match the home’s aesthetic, but this is an incremental change for a system issue.

What I envision is an entire shift of the category. I believe the future of IOT is not the device itself, but how the device recedes into the experience of the environment. I do not believe we’ll see people—especially parents—shift to wearing large headsets that obfuscate the room and normal interaction with their family. Nor “smart” glasses that bring tech so close to your face that it almost becomes part of you (no thanks)—but environments that respect the space of humans, and thoughtfully anticipate their needs there.

So, I have some ideas I’ve started prototyping, and a user research repo I’ve begun. I may document more findings and progress here, but for now, it’s a fun problem space that literally keeps me up at night.

If you’d be interested in participating in my research, let me know. I’m particularly interested in how people with families and/or shared household events navigate management, and what calendar solutions look like in your home.

What calendar solutions do you have in place?