A shared digital whiteboard calendar exploring how blended families coordinate schedules, maintain awareness, and participate across ages, tools, and household boundaries.
Blended families bring partners and children from previous relationships into a shared household. When mixed custody arrangements are involved, children periodically transition between homes while family members of different ages coordinate routines and maintain awareness across distance. Relationships among parents, former partners, stepparents, stepsiblings, and children can also shape what information is appropriate to share—and with whom.
Most digital family calendars assume cohabitation within one home and remain largely parent-centered. Co-parenting tools tend to support adult negotiation or information exchange, while children are often passive recipients. At the same time, much foundational family-calendar research predates today’s cloud synchronization, mobile access, and contemporary blended-family arrangements.
FamilyCanvas asked how a digital calendar could remain visible inside one blended household, be remotely accessible to its members across ages, and account for sensitive relationships—without attempting to directly connect multiple co-parent households.
Scope: FamilyCanvas supports coordination within a blended household and remote access for its members. It was not designed to directly connect or coordinate two co-parent households.
I designed and built FamilyCanvas through a nine-month autobiographical deployment in my supervisor’s blended-family household: five months of iterative design and development, followed by four months of continued use without further design iterations. This situated process provided access to a sensitive context that would have been difficult to understand through short interviews alone.
I expected frequent glances, collaborative maintenance, remote checking, informal messages, and photo sharing. In practice, these behaviors were selective or absent in the first household. Rather than treating that mismatch as failure, I used it to shape the field study: would the same patterns appear in families outside the research team?
FamilyCanvas is a responsive, cloud-hosted web application designed for shared iPads and remote phones. Its core design places an always-available whiteboard interaction surface over two optional information layers: a structured calendar and a spatiotemporal location view.
Vanilla JavaScript composes the weekly interface. DOM elements support notes and photos; HTML Canvas handles pen and touch drawing. The same client adapts from an always-available household display to remote phone access.
The backend persists household and weekly state, broadcasts changes to connected displays, and fetches configured calendar feeds. Data is separated by authenticated household and content type.
A family member draws, adds a note or photo, or edits location information.
The client sends the affected household, week, and content state to Express.
The backend writes the isolated state and identifies the originating device.
A WSS message notifies the other connected household displays.
Other devices update DOM content or redraw the canvas without reloading.
A household’s existing Outlook or Google calendar exposes a configured ICS feed.
The Node.js service periodically retrieves and caches the feed.
The browser requests the household’s cached calendar data.
ICAL.js resolves event and recurrence information in the browser.
Calendar context appears beneath the always-available whiteboard interaction surface.
REST handles request-response persistence and retrieval; WebSocket maintains a long-lived channel for cross-device updates. The deployed study system encrypted these paths with HTTPS and WSS and kept each household’s files and application state separate.
The left column shows what appears within the interface: an always-available whiteboard plus optional calendar and location information. The right column is not another software layer—it shows how the same responsive system was situated on a shared household iPad and accessed remotely by phone.
After the autobiographical phase, I deployed the stable system with two additional North American blended families for five weeks. Each family selected the iPad’s location and used any features they found useful; the goal was to understand appropriation, not force a prescribed workflow.
Four interviews per family traced changing practices across the deployment and follow-up. Interaction logs provided contextual triangulation. I transcribed the interviews and conducted open, axial, and selective coding, while discussing emerging interpretations with my supervisor. The study received SFU research ethics approval.
Before introducing FamilyCanvas, the field study characterized family scheduling and connection as heavy, uneven, and fragmented, with asymmetric information visibility and unstable or restricted remote connection. The findings below describe what changed—or did not—once the system entered everyday use.
Children drew test reminders; parents placed sports posters as zoomable photos; short notes externalized changing routines without formal event entry.
It surfaced selected household-relevant plans while personal calendars, school planners, paper calendars, and messaging retained their own roles.
A washroom counter supported morning checking; a coffee table supported daily glances, but families later recognized the kitchen as a stronger calendaring location. “High traffic” alone was not enough.
Remote checking remained rare. Younger children tended to focus on the household immediately around them and did not remember to check the other home; device availability, small-screen usability, and relational boundaries further constrained use. Families also wanted control over which household or child-related information could be visible from another home.
One family remained mother-led with a child as a secondary contributor; the other was child-led while parents mainly read and assisted. The system reduced some reminders and missed activities without redistributing all scheduling work.
A useful household calendar can surface a carefully selected subset of plans without becoming the authoritative store for every event.
Design for the devices people actually have, the places they naturally encounter, and the moments when checking or updating can become routine.
Children need age-appropriate, low-effort ways to contribute without inheriting adult coordination work; readers and occasional contributors matter too.
Cross-household design should support scoped views—such as child-activity sharing—rather than assume that more information is always beneficial.
The study combined deep situated access with a deliberately small sample. Early design assumptions were shaped by one household and by its most active adult organizers; interviews also centered the most engaged users. Children varied in age and device access, limiting what remote-use findings can establish.
Study more family structures, cultures, custody arrangements, and longer-term deployments.
Use diaries and lightweight feedback to include resistant, peripheral, and low-engagement members directly.
Explore remote awareness that does not assume every child owns or can consistently access a smartphone.
Refine usability and selective sharing across successive deployments while preserving comparable study conditions.
My supervisor advised the research, participated in the autobiographical-design household, and contributed ongoing reflections, critique, and interpretation. Other household members used the system and shared informal feedback; field-study families participated in the evaluation.