Open-plan offices with simplified furniture may look nice and minimalist, but they typically lack built-in storage and organization, making it hard to wrangle all the little things you need to use each day. That calls for some creative solutions that won’t make a cluttered situation even worse. These modern desk organizers are up to the task, and they look good, too.

3D Desk Organizer by Block

The shaped wire that makes up the Sketch Desk Tidy by Block mimics the look of a drawing that’s been translated into a 3D form suggestive of a building. The powder-coated steel cage in blue or black rests upon a wooden base to hold pens and other small office items.

5 Brilliant Ideas from RIT’s Metaproject for Poppin

Poppin, a New York-based shop for modern office products, teamed up with students from the Rochester Institute of Technology for this edition of ‘Metaproject’ to deliver a series of economical, reproducible yet aesthetically pleasing and highly functional accessories. The results solve a lot of storage problems commonly seen in workspaces, especially those that have switched to a minimalist open-plan design scheme that leaves no room for drawers, hooks and cabinets. The creations include the High-Rise Hanging Family, modular organizers that fit over a felt divider; Branch Holder for your keys, bags and headphones; The Booster Desk so you can stand up when you feel like it; the Munch Mat Takeout Bag so you don’t make a mess with your lunch, and the Task Chair Overhanger for purses, scarves and jackets.

Cliff Riser with Built-In Storage

This simple steel riser is more than just a way to elevate your monitor – it has two drawers built into the side to hold small items like tape dispensers and staplers or personal effects. The Cliff by Heckler Design comes in six colors and is just the right size to be useful without taking up too much desk space.

Memory City USB Station

Do you have trouble keeping track of a bunch of different external storage devices like USB thumb drives? Instead of tossing them all in a drawer, keep them handy and visible with the Memory City USB Station. This plastic diorama of train stations scenery includes slots for thumb drives and flash cards, which then tower over the scene like skyscrapers.

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Declutter Your Desk In Style 16 Modern Office Organizers

Helping you grow and harvest edible mealworms right on your kitchen counter, the world’s first desktop-sized insect hive aims to aid a rebranding of an unpopular but nutrient-rich source of protein.

The Livin Farm by Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger is just a few two feet tall and contains eight shelves for housing mealworms at various stages of growth, from egg and pupae to beetle.

The pupae mature in the top drawer, turning into egg-laying beetles. The eggs in turn fall through holes in the floor and grow into worms.

The key to the whole operation is a customized micro-climate within the case as well as a fan, filter and ventilation system. The insects themselves can subsist on vegetable scraps and other kitchen waste.

A button on the box vibrates the operation, separating insects from waste automatically rather than the conventional and less appealing way: sorting by hand. These are chilled in the bottom drawer for storage or can be frozen before being minced and boiled into meals.

Each harvest yields a few hundred grams with protein amounts roughly equivalent to similar weights of meat. The inputs are where the real savings is: less space, water and energy are needed for this system to work.

If the ‘yuck factor’ seems tough to overcome, consider for a moment the foods that have become popular over time across cultures, including the rise of sushi (raw fish and seaweed) in the United States and elsewhere.

Almost everything we once kept at our desks is now packed into our personal computers, but rarely is this phenomena so brilliantly illustrated as in the beautiful video below.

This decades-long transition from the tangible to the digital is shown by the Harvard Innovation Lab as a migration of individual physical items into their corresponding virtual equivalents, desktop icons replacing their counterparts one by one, “demonstrating the steep shift from cork boards and fax machines to pinterest and PDFs.”

Lest you think it is all misdirection or illusion, “the scene is set with actual vintage items sourced by the team of photographers and entrepreneurs: the Macintosh classic, corded phone, fax machine, globe, corkboard, Polaroid camera, and Rolodex were all purchased through individual sellers on ebay, while the rest of the items were found abandoned an unused in basements and at garage sales. While some argue that technology has made our lives more complex, the video below demonstrates the current clarity from clutter, and the ways in which technology encourages productive and social behavior.”

Whether the conclusions match the experiment is subjective (some of us might miss our stuff), but what prompted this ambitious exploration of technological revolutions? The project creators “wondered what it would be like to recreate the desktop from the 1980s and then emulate its transformation through the computer age, to illustrate how technology has changed our world, un-cluttering our desks and simplifying our lives. While gradual change from year to year is often hard to perceive, a longer snapshot gives us a much more dramatic view of the technological progression we have experienced.” The video was produced by Momchil Filev of BestReviews.com with photography by DougThomsen.tv and engineering by Anton Georgiev.