A GOOD TABLE.(human communication could be improved by using table with chairs that move around its perimeter en masse)(Brief Article)

Speaking recently on the telephone from an office in the lakeside city of Lugano, in Switzerland, a civil engineer named Paolo Rais described an invention that he hoped would improve human communication, promote world peace, and reduce the fear of being invited to a large dinner party in a slow restaurant. Rais had just been granted U.S. patent No. 6,375,256, for a "table with seats that move en masse around its perimeter."

Mr. Rais, whose first language is Italian, manages engineering projects for Switzerland's national railroad: he builds bridges and tunnels. He is the kind of man who, after dinner, takes the trouble to repair a retractable umbrella. He recalled that a few years ago he was invited to a wedding where there were a hundred guests, seated at tables of eight or ten. Rais found that he and his immediate neighbors could generate an hour or so of easy conversation. "One hour about the family, holidays--it was not so uncomfortable. They were not bad people," he said. "But I sat there for three hours! And when I went home I thought, Well, I was at a party with a hundred people and I met only these few people who I never met before and I'll never speak to again."

Rais thought about the wedding meal, and the way in which you can be pinned to one spot in a room full of other people you are eager to know. He remembered earlier lonely occasions--once, for example, he had been seated among talkative soccer fans (he has no interest in soccer). He also thought about the way fixed table positions underscore office hierarchies. "Then I had a very strange idea," he said. He imagined a kind of executive fairground ride: a long conference table whose chairs moved around it. The people sitting to your left and right would always be there, but you would move in relation to the person opposite, in a continuous flow that would be as imperceptible "as the movement of a minute hand on a watch." As a result, social and business hierarchies would be unsettled. Enemies would reconcile. Over the course of a meal, conversational empires could rise and fall.

Rais worked on drawings in the evenings and on weekends. Two years ago, he persuaded a friend with a small manufacturing business to build a full-scale prototype, to which he gave the oddly undynamic English name Dynamic Meetings. It ...