When I talked to Austin Radcliffe, the blog’s creator, I learned that the orderly layouts featured on his site have roots in two practices: knolling and mise en place. Knolling is a system of placing objects, usually tools, at right angles to one another on a work surface. It originated in Frank Gehry’s furniture workshop in the late 1980s and was popularized by the artist Tom Sachs. Mise en place, which is French for “putting in its place,” is a similar practice used in professional kitchens to set up for a shift by neatly laying out all ingredients and tools that will be needed.
