the role of the kitchen dining area?  

since my desk is full of clut...
since my desk is full of clutter and my pc theres no room to use it as a desk...so I use dining table for monthly payment of bills, put my sewing machine on it for mending, before I had a large kitchen island, occasionally used it for ironing..maybe the guys have other uses?

As a
design student in the (compratively) ancient city of Providence, forty years ago, we were given the problem of reinterpreting the old concept of the "keeping room" -- the kitchen-living space, as found in Colonial-era homes. This was in the post-war modern era, of course, when the open planning of the home was in full flower; the informal "expanded kitchen" has taken firm root in the American home, long since. . .

SDR
You went to RISD??? Well,well,well now that's an interesting tidbit. I love the RISD Museum, the feature exhibits are always soooo great. That and the Cooper-Hewitt in NYC are my personal favs. And have you ever been to the Providence Fine Furniture Fair, oh such beautiful things...

I haven't been
back to New England in twenty years -- and missed Providence on that trip, so I've missed a lot. I understand the renewed river exposure, between the school and the rest of the city, is nice. . .
Almost went to Cooper Union, but have never been to the highly regarded museum. Is there a new Steven Holl (?) building, there ?

SDR,
Did you see Warhols Raid the icebox show?

Liisak...Pt.1
I am 50, my wife 42, my son 7 yesterday. We are probably not the mean or the median for households, because of our late start on adding to the population. But...
We do everything at our kitchen and dining room tables except sleep, and, ironically, occassionally eat at them. Nothing relieves the boredom of our family quite so much as a dinner on the floor around our fire place. These affairs are quite spontaneous. I think the underlying cause is we just can't bare to look at each other one more time in the rigid triangluation imposed by our kitchen and dining tables.
We run, ahem, a loose ship here. Order is a metaphysical concept that only St. Thomas Aquinas could have the nerve to discuss seriously.
I notice that we migrate back and forth from use of the kitchen vs. the dining room table. Basically, when one gets so overwhelmed with school work, a week of mail, model building, art work, dinosaur digging (if a designer wants to make a break-out furniture item devise table especially for children digging on preformed blocks with dinosaur bones imbedded in them), flashlights, glasses, a transformer or two, and the inevitable accumulation of bionicle spare parts, well, we do what any rational, overwhelmed family would do, we shift action to the dining room table.
It is important to have two big tables; that way it takes longer to clutter them up. The downside is it takes more courage and time to wade in and clean them up. Basically, we last two weeks at the dining room table and one week at the kitchen table.

Liisak...Pt.2
Of course one table often holds sway for certain anomalous, but very practical reasons at any given time. The dining room table became exceedingly popular because of its lushly padded chairs, when my son went through a 3 month phase of nudism. A cold, hard wood chair on a bare bum lacks a certain tactile reinforcement, don't you know. Now that the nature boy phase has passed (for a time anyway), the appeal of the oak kitchen table and unpadded chairs has returned, because we allow him to make bigger messes their, because the floor is wood there, where as the dining room (in an acute departure from good sense) is carpeted (with creamy white carpet). Our carpet cleaning bill is almost as high as our mortgage payment.
I truly believe all the accumulation of action around the table is a very human desire to impose communion on a contemporary life style that seems to conspire against such communion. There is no time to cook great meals and sit for along time. There are so many endless, inane, practical tasks to be done. So, I believe, we humans are adapting. We're saying if we can't be together for three leisurely square meals a day, why then we'll get our communal time at the table another way. Dad, if you want to withdraw into your computer, why we'll move it onto the kitchen table. Mom, if you're going to disappear and ride horses on us and work long hours healing people, why then we'll just move your mountainous pile of mail you have to review right onto the dining room table and you can review it with us while we are eating or building a three stage rocket. One way or another, we primates are going to get our communal time as surely as we are going to groom and pick nits.
Remember when whe F.L. Wright put the fireplace in the middle of the house and radiated activiteis outwards. Its a nice idea. But today I would move a vast dining room table to the center of the house and radiate activities around it.
Just my thoughts in the middle of the storm.