In 2025, I designed and built a dining table that encourages people to draw attention away from their phones and back to each other. Rather than preventing phone use, the design turns the private action of checking a phone into a shared moment, making shifts in attention noticeable and encouraging more attentive face-to-face communication.
Phones clutter the dining table and affect how present we are with each other. Even silent and face-down, a phone is still a distraction. Yet they often land on the table not from carelessness but necessity - pockets are uncomfortable, bags aren't always reachable, and people are unwilling to put their devices somewhere not quickly accessible. There's simply no place for it to be both out of sight and within reach.
This tension revealed a design opportunity: to create a space for phones that preserves accessibility while reducing their presence in a shared social space.
Early on I defined two main principles to ensure greater success in the shift of behaviour:
Placing a phone inside the table needed a clear benefit - otherwise, leaving it on the tabletop would be too tempting. The goal wasn't to remove the phone from the experience, but to repurpose its features into a meaningful interaction between phone and furniture. This led to exploring the phone's flashlight as part of the dining experience.
A user must be able to reach the phone, but the phone cannot reach the user. This led to integrating dedicated phone pockets beneath the tabletop, positioned close to each user's seat to keep devices within immediate reach while removing them from sight.
The first challenge was transforming the phone’s harsh flashlight into a subtle interaction that felt integrated with the table. I explored different ways of directing and diffusing light through material experiments with acrylic and optic fibre, testing how thickness, frosting, and positioning affected the quality of the glow.
Placing the flash from the long edge of an acrylic strip would create a spotlight.
Placing the flash from the short edge would result in a soft diffusion through the long edge.
With the lighting system established, I shifted focus toward integrating the interaction into the table’s form.
Up to four people can gather at the table.
Flash needs to be activated before placing the device into a pocket.
Each device illuminates one half of the acrylic element.
If one device were to be removed, this would be noticeable by all persons at the table.
The final challenge was bringing the design into a physical form. CAD was a critical tool for resolving the complex relationship between components, allowing me to refine dimensions, joints, and placement before translating the concept into a functional object. The table was fabricated through a combination of CNC machining and traditional woodworking techniques, requiring precise alignment between multiple components.
Ultimately, the design explores the social dynamics created by our relationship with mobile devices. Checking a phone during a conversation already signals that something outside the present moment has taken priority; this design aims to amplify that by making the interruption visible and shared. While focused on communal dining, the project aims to see attention as a shared resource, and offer a subtle intervention that helps people stay present with one another.
The challenge isn't unique to the dinner table. The same tensions around attention show up in classrooms, workplaces, and other collaborative settings where people are trying to focus, communicate, and collaborate.