Exploring Design and Combination of Ambient Information and Peripheral Interaction

In modern office life people have to keep track of many appointments and are overwhelmed by notifications. Paper calendars are complemented with electronic tools such as Outlook or Google Calendar, which offer reminder popups. However, these notifications are (1) disruptive (imposing both an immediate context switch as well as a change of input focus on the user), thus (2) causing problems such as lost text input or accidental confirmation of a pop-up. In this paper, we investigate designing an ambient calendar that lowers disruptions while maintaining awareness. To further reduce focus switches between the main task and calendar, we show how peripheral interactions can be used for (1) acquiring details, and (2) silencing the reminder. Author