List Making in the Home
This paper presents research on the use of household lists. Drawing on an ethnographic study of mothers’ work, it focuses on the centrality of paper lists in home- and child-care arrangements, and reveals that they provide a useful means for organizing the complex interrelations between a household’s people, activities and tasks. However, paper lists are also shown to be poor at handling the separation, or classification, of these things. In conclusion, both these positive and negative aspects of list making are used to raise broad pointers for CSCW and system design.
Copyright © 2004 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library -http://www.acm.org/dl/.