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Activity is a foundational issue in interaction design. We view activity not as an analytic concept for designing artifacts, but as an object itself to be designed for. People think of their work lives as organized into activities–they not only carry out activities, but also they manage them–they plan, prioritize, schedule, interrupt, resume, delegate, report on, etc. We are exploring the design of computational support for activity management.

A case study of a complex activity is presented. It shows that subactivities vary from the formal, scheduled, and sequential to the informal, opportunistic, and parallel. The activity was explicitly represented; and this representation was reused to refine the activity in subsequent years and to hand the activity off to another person. From a series of ethnographic interviews we found that people put a lot of effort into planning their activities. People occasionally plan for the long-term: lay out goals, milestones, resources, etc. But every day people juggle what they planned to do with unanticipated daily demands. There is great variability in people’s planning practices.