Accordingly, there is a sense in which it is difficult to interpret the SSI without also having a good understanding of the chart-atlas of contemporary practice (CACP). In so far as they constitute recognizable entities, practices have potentially identifiable spatial and temporal coordinates, that is, practice-time profiles. The CACP, which represents the totality of contemporary practices in terms of related injunctions or compulsions, minutes of attention required and associated features of sequence and timing, can also be used to plot the social-spatial distribution of specific practices. The CACP can, for example, reveal all those social groups and societies in which extremely time-hungry sports like golf are established and in which they exist as something that people routinely do. The latest versions of the CACP can be calibrated to represent a day or a lifetime and can be adjusted to produce formal estimates of practice squeeze.<sup>8</sup>
There are already precedents for the CACP, but on a much more limited scale. Oskar Korkman (2006) has, for example, sought to categorize the spatial and temporal qualities of the usefully limited array of possibilities open to families travelling on cruise ships between Finland and Sweden. This exercise, based on observation and interviews with literally captive respondents, suggested that the cruising experience was marked by tensions between the contrasting temporalities of child- and adult-orientated practices, and between activities properly undertaken together or alone. Korkman, who is a management consultant, makes a number of practical suggestions based on his analysis. Maybe the shipping line could reduce family frictions by introducing things to do that are not as temporally incompatible as the current array of practices on offer. The suggestion that organizations might get involved in what Korkman refers to as ‘practice design’<sup>9</sup> is intriguing, as is the possibility that companies might deliberately scan contemporary configurations of practice-time looking for niches of opportunity in the current eco-system of daily life. Systematic studies, perhaps based on methods of time-space geography, might well reveal empty moments waiting to be colonized or point to gaps associated with the disappearance or modification of practices the effective accomplishment of which used to be especially demanding.
Everyday Practice
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