
Knolling - bestest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolling
======
state
"Always. Be. Knolling." [0], is probably my favorite of Tom Sachs' Ten
Bullets. As a whole, it's a pretty good office manual. Better for a studio
than a startup office — but worth a look nonetheless.

0 -
[https://youtu.be/49p1JVLHUos?t=15m38s](https://youtu.be/49p1JVLHUos?t=15m38s)

~~~
mcguire
"Arbitrary decision making and personal inventiveness are discouraged."

~~~
state
jraines mostly got it. It's worth noting the look and feel of the Sachs
studio. I doubt anyone is taking that advice completely seriously. But if,
instead, you just said 'have fun, do whatever!' things would probably be a
huge mess.

~~~
evanlivingston
No, Tom Sachs is super serious about that and it's strictly enforced in his
studio.

Source: friend worked in his studio.

~~~
state
That's so interesting! And strange!

~~~
egypturnash
There's a balance to strike between "wanting everyone working under you to
implement exactly your vision", "wanting everyone working under you to make
something more amazing by throwing their own ideas in".

An important part of finding this balance is deciding exactly how much you
trust your underlings to know enough about what the hell they're doing so that
they don't do anything dumb, and to have a vision closely enough aligned with
yours that their attempts at improving your ideas usually make you delighted.
Clearly Sachs is not willing to extend much trust to people he is just now
hiring to work in his studio.

Like, would you be happy with an intern fresh out of school who decided to
roll their own crypto instead of interfacing to the library you told them to?

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Sachs also got burnt by "outsourcing" on his 1998 "SONY Outsider"
installation, which neither he nor art critics were happy with after it was
completed.

------
BoppreH
There's a great subreddit dedicated to this, with lots of content:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/knolling/](https://www.reddit.com/r/knolling/)

I find it specially interesting when it's done to "dissect" machines, making
it look like schematics. I find it helps dispelling the impression of things
being black boxes.

~~~
ballenf
No amount of knolling will help me with my usual problem taking apart
complicated machinery:

[https://xkcd.com/1780/](https://xkcd.com/1780/)

(That's titled Appliance Repair)

~~~
Animats
That's what little parts boxes with lots of separate compartments are for.[1]
That's one of my projects.

[1]
[http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.htm...](http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.html)

------
__jal
My grandfather carefully painted black silhouettes of tools that hung behind
his workbench, so he could tell at a glance if anything was missing. (There
was a house rule of use anything you want, but it better go back where it came
from when you were done.)

He didn't do that with his toolboxes, but all but one of those were locked.

I do find I do this as a sort of a tick, while thinking through my next step
while making stuff.

~~~
kaybe
This is a professional technique.

The hangar I just came from has hard rules - if any tool is missing the planes
are grounded until the tool is found. No matter what. So you better don't lose
those tools.

~~~
rhcom2
Seems like an especially good rule when working on planes or people. Now where
did the surgical sponge go...

~~~
greenshackle2
"To prevent leaving surgical items inside patients, the Association of
periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) recommends counting all sponges,
sharps, and related miscellaneous items at five different times: (1) before
the procedure to establish a baseline, (2) before closure of a cavity within a
cavity, (3) before wound closure begins, (4) at skin closure, and (5) at the
time of permanent staff relief of either the scrub person or the circulating
nurse"

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK133403/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK133403/)

~~~
Pulcinella
Atul Gawande talks about this in "The Checklist Manifesto." I believe he
recommmends that the nurses who are keeping track (and people who are
following checklists in general) must be empowered to pause the surgery.
Otherwise surgical equipment still gets left in patients because of egos.

"No I totally got all the sponges out of the patient! How dare you question my
authority!"

~~~
kpil
I have two ideas for automatic machines in hospitals.

One is hand sanitizer dispensers that counts people entering rooms and beeps
until all have used the machine, or even until all people already in the room
have used it.

It's notoriously hard to get people to use hand sanitizers.

The other is convenient and fast dispensers that counts tools and sponges as
they are used.

~~~
jdeibele
Was listening to Atul Gawande on the podcast "Conversations with Tyler".
Sponges are now bar-coded (less expensive than RFID, etc.) and scanned during
the process to make sure they're not left inside the patient.

------
smnscu
Also see Andrew Kim's book 90° on knolling. Andrew is the designer behind
minimallyminimal.com, the Microsoft redesign concept, Xbox One S, who now
works at Tesla.

[http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/90degrees](http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/90degrees)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/90-degrees/id605530423?mt=1...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/90-degrees/id605530423?mt=11)

~~~
noir_lord
I bought an Xbox One S recently (didn't know anything about the S it was just
a good price for an Xbox).

Its a beautiful piece of hardware and doesn't look out of place under the TV
like the old Xboxes somehow did.

------
kosma
OT: This has been parodied at least once; see Stackenblochen[1].

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEN5-_93gQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEN5-_93gQg)

------
sboselli
The wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but just like Tom Sachs spent time
at Gehry's shop and adopted this term and practice; so did Casey Neistat spent
time at Sachs' shop, where he also adopted it (and probably made it more well
known than ever before). If you've seen Casey's videos or pictures of his
famous NY studio; this is where it all came from.

~~~
switchbak
Is this just OCD, or is there an actual benefit to Knolling?

My gut reaction to this is that it's distracting compulsive behaviour, but I
could be wrong. I've found organization for a workshop to be of unexpectedly
huge value, so I could be wrong here too.

~~~
snissn
It seems that it's really easy to find stuff. Like in this [1] picture, it's
really clear where the sledge hammer is, but if things were arranged randomly
it would be more difficult

1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolling#/media/File:Ten_Bulle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolling#/media/File:Ten_Bullets_II.jpg)

~~~
dwringer
That seems like a very interesting and useful application of theories in pre-
attentive processing. When everything is aligned to the same orientation then
the attribute of orientation may become almost effortless to perceive and
cognitive resources can be devoted to more targeted feature recognition. There
is a section of chapter 5 in the book "Information Visualization: Perception
for Design" by Colin Ware [1] called "preattentive processing and ease of
search" that goes into nice detail on considerations such as this. (See also
[2])

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Information-Visualization-Third-
Inter...](https://www.amazon.com/Information-Visualization-Third-Interactive-
Technologies/dp/0123814642)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-
attentive_processing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-attentive_processing)

------
DanBlake
I built a entire website essentially built around this -
[http://www.everydaycarry.com](http://www.everydaycarry.com) \- its been crazy
seeing something that started off as a niche hobby turning into a business

~~~
menzoic
The images are too high res for mobile. It loads too slow.

~~~
jasongill
The site is ranked in the Alexa top 10,000 in the US - I'd wager that DanBlake
knows what he's doing and probably has the site dialed in for his target
audience & device already.

~~~
iDemonix
Did you check the claim yourself? Or did you just feel the need to brown-nose
for no reason? Not sure, but if you take the time to check (takes less time
than typing your comment, or searching the Alexa DB), you'll see the front
page for the site is just shy of 7MB, so I'd agree with the comment that it
could do with being optimised better for mobile.

~~~
jasongill
"Alexa Traffic Rank" browser extension shows the ranking for every site you
visit, checking is a course of habit. My point was simply that the site is
pretty darned popular, and as OP said, it's a business. A comment like "The
images are too high res for mobile. It loads too slow." sounds more like
jealous nit picking than anything else

~~~
iDemonix
Well the site is nearly 7MB, so it isn't, maybe next time take the 5 seconds
to open Developer Tools to check?

I wouldn't browse it on a mobile over cellular, 10 mins of browsing around the
site could knock 100MB of my plan quite quickly.

------
falcolas
Adam Savage is a compulsive knoller - if you watch his podcasts you can
frequently see him arranging items in front of him into parallel and
perpendicular shapes.

~~~
bch
> Adam Savage is a compulsive knoller

And is friends with another famous knoller -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxLxwbm7FMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxLxwbm7FMA)
,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ)

------
hkon
If you have knolled everything you own but still want more, check out this:
[http://stupiddesk.com/](http://stupiddesk.com/)

------
NTripleOne
Holy shit, I had no idea this had a name - I've been doing this all my life.

I guess it also explains why I find angular designs more attractive than
rounded/circular ones - sitting here at my desk looking at the circular
monitor stand bases, cylindrical bluetooth speaker, coins and some cables
coiled up, these things can't be knolled, so I tend to stack round things
instead (in diameter order, of course).

------
spraak
I never knew it was Knolling that is in almost every stock photo of a desk for
a startup's landing page

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makeset
Ha! I remember discovering this as a teenager, that I didn't have to actually
tidy up my room/desk to avoid getting yelled at, as long as I aligned
everything in place at right angles. It's always good to put a name on the
phenomenon.

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ronjouch
Didn't know this practice has a name! Thanks HN :)

Sharing the excellent bandcamp of two musicians whose profile picture is a
knolling of themselves and their gear. Bandcamp:
[https://qdrpd.bandcamp.com/](https://qdrpd.bandcamp.com/) , knolling:
[https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0000904983_10.jpg](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0000904983_10.jpg)

------
e12e
Recommend one of the "See also"-links from the Wikipedia page, for those not
familiar with the term:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place)

------
afishisafish
I own several peaces of Knoll furniture. Certainly not the cheapest, but the
build quality is superior and the chairs are extremely comfortable. Great
company!

------
ttoinou
.. But, why ?

~~~
DKnoll
Don't ask me.

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keyle
aside/fun: What would be knolling code be like? :)

~~~
bitwize
I worked at a shop that insisted on one parameter per line in function calls.

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leandrod
How long for deletionists to get wind of it?

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cJ0th
I can't be the only one who expected this to be about a certain Google project
that aimed at organizing knowledge ;)

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Froyoh
I wish I found about this sooner...

------
geff82
You never stop learning reading HN :)

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duck
What do you call it if you've always aligned things like this?

------
moomin
Here I was expecting an article on Google's Wikipedia competitor. But I guess
that isn't notable...

