Calendar Collective
JUNE 2020
Calendars play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. However, these tools are not neutral; they codify values and behavior while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we conceptualize it.
Calendar Collective focuses on the 'aesthetics of unreal time’ by mutating the visual design of calendars, distorting expectations, and creating calendars that live between the possible and the impossible. By knotting together co-design workshops, counterfactual history techniques, and my own lived cultural encounters, I created an archive of alternate calendars—both real and imagined—traced through voicemails. The voicemails serve as a reminder that complex socio-cultural systems, based on alternate temporal thought, have always existed and still do.
↪ Speculative Design, Design Fiction
↪ Personal Project
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www.calendarcollective.com
Next Generation Foresight Practioners Award 2022
Watch me talk about the project or read the research paper
In an article about Designed Realities Lab
Calendar Collective is a living archive of alternate calendars. It is an ongoing investigation for collecting, cataloguing and publishing calendars that are little-known to our world. We use openly contributed voicemails as are our unique research material. The archive offers an uncommon collection of calendars traced through these unwritten and slightly incongruous fragments.
Moon Calendar : Here the night is variable. It fluctuates with the phases of the moon. Some nights are short while others long
☎ RESEARCH SOURCE VOICEMAIL TRANSCRIPTION
“Hello! Is this Lakeside Resort? I am calling to dispute a charge... my name is Jon and I stayed in your hotel for a night .... let's see... on the twelfth and I think in the room 412. It was a No Moon night...so it should have been a baseline charge ...it was hardly a few hours- but you seem to have charged me for a Waxing Crescent. Can you double check and get back to me as soon as possible? Thank you”
Flower Calendar: Here time blooms and withers with the opening and closing of flowers.
☎ RESEARCH SOURCE VOICEMAIL TRANSCRIPTION
"Hey Milo, do you know any chrono-biologist in the area? Ava is starting her night shift...and we don't
really have anything for that time. And you know .. we just moved here ... so we are not quite familiar
with the local bloomers.. plus i hardly have a green thumb - so just want something we can tend do..
and I don't mind paying for a house call. Anyway ...let me know if you have an expert….bye."
Drift Calendar : Here time is aligned on the first day of the week. Then it begins to drift away in no fixed order or direction, until the start of the next week when it is aligned again.
☎ RESEARCH SOURCE VOICEMAIL TRANSCRIPTION
"Hello, my name is Sukanya.. This is the fifth time I calling you and I have still not received any response.My ISP code is 243179...again its 243179. My time isn't drifting. In fact, it’s moving quite
precisely ..so right now I am just avoiding looking at it ..I mean it’s silly if I always know the time. So could you please send in someone to fix it during the next sync. Thanks"
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTION
We are open most days, about midday –seldom as early as the daybreak, and some days as late as dusk. We close about when the sun goes down or twilight, and occasionally at midnight, but sometimes even beyond midnight. Some days we are not here at all, but lately, we are here most of the time except when we are somewhere else.
If you would like to contribute, please leave a voicemail at +1(646) 371-5045. More at www.calendarcollective.com
EVEN ODD CALENDAR 2023
In 2023, we are reimagining ways to restore the relationship between work and leisure with an Even Odd calendar layered on top of the Gregorian calendar. This calendar invites you to align yourself to a rhythm alternating between Even and Odd days. One for work and the other for leisure.
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Graphic design by Yang Yifan Dong, Riso-printing by But Whole Press, SF.
Instead of thinking about this only during a workshop, or an event we want participants to live with this calendar. So we invite you to embed this calendar in your life, to align yourself to this alternating rhythm, to ruminate on your relationship with time, and, ultimately, to take a more active role in shaping your own experience of it.
You can join our research study and help us bend the shape of time. Email us at hello@calendarcollective.com to get involved.
Living with the calendar
This is part of a design-led research investigation that challenges the normative understanding of time as linear, objective and neutral. While our current calendar is a mathematical abstraction, our lived experience of time is divergent. Calendars are ‘designed’ tools. They can therefore be redesigned. These tools can be reassembled to respond to temporal challenges in new ways. In this pursuit, I craft tangible artifacts and lead workshops, both brief and extensive, to guide participants in grasping the malleable nature of time The goal is to foster individual and collective connections with time that go beyond the ordinary.
If delving into this exploration on a personal or community level intrigues you, reach out to curate an experience for transforming the perception of time.