Never was a product more auspiciously named than Patricia Urquiola’s “Digitable” Low Tables. One look at these minimalistic pieces and you’ll know you’re in commune with the digital age, in more ways than one. Constructed of “matte black or white varnished water-jet drilled steel sheet,” the twin tables make no bones about their high-tech origins.

Digitable. Designed by Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia.

Manufacturer B&B Italia deigns to provide the specifics of their genesis, but one imagines a pristine laboratory agleam with jump-suited technicians armed with spigots expelling thin, deadly streams with laser-like precision, thus etching each table with an inimitable binary design. The perforated pattern that is Digitable’s hallmark seems a tangible representation of the language of computers, and this is certainly one interpretation of the mysterious moniker. But I’m drawn to the tactility of these tables—all those geometricized squiggles definitely invite poking and prodding; hence, the “digit” in Digitable might be an open invitation to discovery through touch.

And if I might propose a third meaning: insert a simple space between the g and the i and you have the “dig it” (t)able,” which, in addition to evoking the most genial of Shaft-era slang, puts me in mind of archeology; specifically, the cryptograms of Sumerian cuneiform or the inscrutable pictographs of the Proto-Mayans, both symbols that highly resemble Digitable’s water-formed designs (okay, so this last one stretches it a bit, but that’s half the fun…). Clearly meant to provoke a new aesthetic grounded in burgeoning technologies, Digitable succeeds precisely because it evokes the new as well as the old. An icon for the computer age, Urquiola’s piece will enthrall young and old—those born in front of a computer screen and those who yet struggle with the clock function on their ancient VCR. So even if you’re among the few who maintain that “twitter” is just the sound a bird makes, you’ll still think Digitable is the cat’s pajamas.