Apparently and unsurprisingly Things Organized Neatly (or TON for the sake of keeping things tidy) has developed a sizeable following online. Everything on this tumbler site is selected by the Indianapolis designer behind TON, drifting obsessively between practical, methodolical organisation of things and indulgent arrangements of average objects which collectively are a great deal more interesting.

A wall of interchangeable post-it notes, aiding the process of doing all the things you ‘want to’ do in a day (rather than ‘to do’s'). Row upon row of identical lego men with one rogue lego man breaking the pattern, for no reason in particular.

It’s an approach to organising and ordering which flashes up in design, art and performance, such as artist Sophie Calle who lived on the Chromatic Diet, eating only foods of specific colours each day. Deciding to live her life by the rituals adopted by a character in a Paul Auster novel, she dissolved the line between her life and work of fiction.

TON ponders how we far we might allow the floodgates to open to systems we can control, when our daily routines become mundane and not nearly as thrilling as we’d like. The things we own could be our outlet for experimentation and rebellion in an impractical pointless way.

However we might take note of how Sophie Calle evaluated her experience on the Chromatic Diet; ‘Personally, I preferred not to eat; novels are all very well but not necessarily so very delectable if you live them to the letter’

Jane Faram

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