Tingens och själens ordning

Fredrik skriver om städning: Ordning och reda, städa på fredag. Tingens placering speglar våra inre:

Egentligen ska man inte behöva skämmas för att visa upp sitt stökiga hem. Det är ju faktiskt en ärlig spegling av ens sanna jag. Men det är väl å andra sidan det vi är rädda för.

När det gäller stökiga skrivbord har det hävdats att det tvärtom kan finnas ordning i de till synes röriga högarna:

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles — piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

Från artikeln The social life of paper, en text som bland andra Peter diskuterat tidigare.