Tablet

Tablet takes its name from the ancient tablets of Mesopotamia. Their shapes varied enormously because there was never one definitive form. They simply needed to provide a surface for writing.

That practicality is part of their appeal. Some carried accounts and inventories, while others held correspondence, stories and ideas. Ordinary objects became records of everyday life and, sometimes, much more.

Long before information became weightless, it had physical presence. A message could be held, stacked, stored or carried. Words belonged to an object as much as they belonged to language.

These tablets survived because someone pressed marks into clay or cut them into stone. The surface became part of the memory. Tablet takes its cue from those simple objects rather than their inscriptions. The shape is deliberately modest, with the same sense of being made for a purpose.

There is a nice connection between then and now. We still call the object we carry information on a tablet. The material has changed completely, but the idea has somehow survived.