The sci-fi thriller "Minority Report" envisioned a world in which virtually any surface could convey information. Mickey McManus, president and CEO of Maya Design, says "the trillion-node network" that would make such a world possible will be upon us within five years.

That network will include far more than the billions of computers attached to the Internet, or the countless cell phones in consumers' pockets or the GPS devices in their cars.

"We make more transistors than grains of rice, and we make them cheaper," he said. And we're putting them everywhere -- in picture frames, on shipping crates.

Asked if anyone is ready for a world in which interconnected microprocessors are everywhere, he emphatically answers, "No."

The problem, Mr. McManus says, is that we aren't equipped for the complexity generated by all of the "smart stuff" that we are creating: VCRs that never stopped blinking "12:00" were just a harbinger of an even larger gulf developing between what our technology can do and how well we can use it.

The answer, he says, is better design -- not in the sense of making things more attractive, although that may go some distance, but in making them easier to use.

That is where Maya comes in. The firm, whose motto is "taming complexity," works with a wide range of corporate customers, including some Fortune 500 companies, to design their offerings so that they are easier to use. The goal is to find the sweet spot that balances ease of use with power. In fact, the company's name is an acronym for "Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable" design.

Maya was launched in 1989 as a collaboration among three Carnegie Mellon University professors -- Jim Morris, a technologist who had worked at the ground-breaking Palo Alto Research Center; Peter Lucas, a cognitive psychologist; and Joe Ballay, an industrial designer.

Despite its academic origins, "we're not academic starry-eyed researchers," Mr. McManus said. "We're shipping real products."

That includes products such as Eaton Electrical's Home Heartbeat, which the company bills as "the world's first home-awareness system."

The system consists of a wireless base unit, a set of sensors to be placed around the home, and a portable controller/display unit. The system transmits information about the condition of the house -- Are any doors open? Are lights on? Is the basement wet? -- to the controller, which is small enough to fit on a key ring.

To speed the design process, Maya used what it calls "Wizard of Oz" prototyping. It recruited a cadre of consumers to act as testers, but instead of building actual hardware for them, gave each user 10 sticky notes to put around their houses in places they care about.

Then Maya conducted a series of simulations of scenarios that could occur in an empty home. For instance, the flooding of a basement would prompt a phone call or a text message, and the users would record in a logbook how they would respond to the emergency.

The use of sticky notes to represent electronic devices saved the company the time and expense of manufacturing prototypes until they had thoroughly tested how people would use them. It also helped Eaton avoid introducing a product that consumers could not use.

The unusual mix of interests and expertise among Maya's founding trio meant that from the beginning the company focused on questions that might escape other design consultants; for instance, questions not just about how an object might be used, but about how people actually think about their uses of objects.

Maya devotes 30 percent of its work to pure research, and has remained privately owned.

"We have a mission to make the world easier, and I think it would get diluted" by going public, Mr. Manus said.

Profitable from its first year, Maya has spun off several other companies: Viz, which conducted research for the Defense Department, was sold to General Dynamics; Rhiza Labs, a software company; and Maya Group, which provides administrative support for the new companies.

Later this year, the company plans to spin off Luma Institute to offer training for companies that want to mimic Maya's "human-centered design" approach.

Maya began offering such training in 2007. Referring to one client's large engineering staff, Mr. McManus said, "They were pretty good at engineering something and knowing how to make something work right. But they were having a hard time figuring out what to make."

Maya uses a three-day workshop that includes brainstorming and interviewing users to come up with a real project by the third day.

Mr. McManus said that in the past year, Maya has trained some 300 engineers in "how to think differently, how to innovate and how to do it in a rapid way."

And with the trillion-node network upon us, companies of all sorts need to innovate, rapidly.

"I'm scared," he said. "Whole industries will fall, and new industries will rise."

To illustrate the growth of electronic computing, he draws a picture of a range of mountains and valleys, with each peak higher than the one before. Between our peak, with billions of connections to the Internet, and the next, the trillion-node network, a chasm looms.

"The guys who build all this [current] stuff have a vested interest" in using it to get to the next peak, he said. Thus, the turf wars between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. But their attempts to bridge the chasm are no more than "rickety scaffolding."

"Humans haven't designed anything for a trillion before," he said. No version of Windows, no distribution of Linux, can scale to that level. The only thing we have that can is peer-to-peer networking.

Focusing on the opportunities the transition may create, his tone turns more hopeful. "There's a very fertile world out there when it comes to people and information."

What might the trillion-node network look like?

"Every surface will be a display surface," Mr. McManus said. "We'll have a personal joystick to the world. We'll use this physical world to help us deal with all of that complexity …. That's one of the ways we'll cope."