John Kestner’s Tableau

John Kestner’s Tableau is a repurposed nightstand hooked up to the internet and a printer. The nightstand waits for photo tweets from family members, then prints them out and drops them into the drawer. Pictures can also be dropped into the drawer, scanned, and uploaded to twitter.

I’m always excited to see projects that blur the boundary between new digital media and traditional physical artifacts. Personally, I don’t think I could have as much of an attachment to some photos on flickr or facebook as I could with a real physical photo album. This particular example isn’t that feasible for most people, but it is a nice idea. You can easily imagine this being used by a grandmother to share photos with her hip tech-conscious grandchildren. The key thing here is that she doesn’t even need to know what twitter or the internet is, just drop photos in and get photos back. Magic.