Hope is the thing with feathers and Twitter

“Tableau” is a nightstand that quietly prints out photos from Twitter and places them in its drawer. Its designer, John Kestner, is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab who is interested in what he calls “post-computer interaction.” From the video and Kestner’s own description, it seems the prototype is design fiction at this point (maybe it would be better to call it design poetry?). But a version was shown at the Saint-tienne International Design Biennale (the theme of which was “Teleportation”), and Kestner plans a production version using Zink, a new printing technology that uses paper impregnated with pigment crystals.

Robert Quigley at Geekosystem calls Tableau “Twitter in reverse,” pointing out that in contrast to other real-world items that are made to tweet, Tableau does “its transmuting in the opposite direction, creating beautiful physical objects from the cloud.”

But when I see Tableau it makes me think of Emily Dickinson, who famously “published” the majority of her poems by carefully copying them out and putting them in a drawer-

We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the Drawer
Till it an Antique fashion shows
Like Costumes Grandsires wore.