Future Calendar life

The emergence of Calendar can be traced back to human’s innate desire towards structures as a necessary social condition. However, the development of Calendar also led to a culture of toxic efficiency and “calendarized” augmentations, as well as a lack of serendipity.

In this film, my team partner and I want to propose heterogeneous ways where Calendar can coexist with us. As we all relate to this ambivalence towards structures, how can our love-hate relationship with Calendar be reflected in a post-Calendar future? Does it mean the total abandonment or resistance towards efficiency once-for-all, or are we allowing room for more seamless integrations and intrusions? Moreover, how can we place our attitude of partial-acceptance and partial-rejection into a form of fluidity that enables peaceful and diverse coexistence?

The film analyzes deeply into Calendar’s rich spatial and temporal dimensions by deconstructing forms and reconstructing inner qualities, proposing ways of adding diverse personal attitudes into various forms of reconstruction.

Design Process

 [Research of calendars]

Under the topic of future work, I am interested in the instrumentalized behavior patterns and how people identify themselvess. When algorithms create a set of working logic for people, it seems that most people can survive if only they adapt to it.
“A friend once told me he saw no pleasure in eating, seeing food purely as fuel. This is what the ethos of productivity risks reducing play into: a “recharging the batteries” process subservient to work.
It seems that people’s values are changing along with development of ethos of productivity.Does that mean any non-productive behaviours are eccentric?What do we lose during this process? What kinds of methods are used to promote the idea of productivity? How can we resist them?
At first several weeks, I put my focus on the remote working and time-controlling software. Then I tried to extend my idea on how it would develop and coexist with us in the future. After collaborating with one of my classmate. The idea switched to a media that has more possibilities both on functions but physical forms.

[Video composition]

We connect the idea of ‘Toxic Efficency’ to its original use, body movement, playful entertainment, and also forms of resistence. How does efficiency gets toxic quickly through the use of calendar?How does the visual aesthetics of the calendar speaks to toxic efficiency? How to use calendar as a design medium in itself? These are several design questions we have asked.

Responding to that, we want to show the usage of calendars in a future work context as different responses to productivity. By proposing different ways of interacting with the calendar, we tried to deconstruct the concept of calendar with more human agencies, where the result can be both passively mechanizing and actively entertaining. Introducing a series of vignettes, we are also proposing ways of resistance towards toxic efficiency as callings for work-liberation.

 [Scenes making]

1.Digital Obsession & Task Anxiety

2. Monitoring and Countdown

3. Calendarized living