People who love their big expensive tvs, but resist turning the living room into a television shrine.

Such as:

For years, I watched all my media on a 12″ laptop. My husband recently upgraded us, and I coolly resented the invading beast for weeks. Then we got the BBC Planet Earth dvds as a gift. It’s incredible: you can see every last crusted whisker on those Mongolian camels. Also, we get the Food Network, and I love the inappropriately excited sounds Paula Deen makes while pulling fruit cobbler out of the oven.

So the tv isn’t going back, and it needs a forever home. And it has special needs, like unattractive wires requiring easy access to plugs. But nature porn aside, the tv isn’t the focal point of our lives, and it shouldn’t occupy that place in our living room.

We want a tv stand that looks good as a piece of furniture first, and functions nicely as a media stand second. A design-forward front, with ventilated holes in the back. (Btw we rent, so wall mounting isn’t a good option.)

We want tons of storage, with drawers and cabinets to hide the dvd player/speakers/cables, and cds and dvds. (You want your collection to be 100% Criterion, but the truth is you own Total Body Yoga Makeover, plus three copies of “Rumours.” Put it away.)

And our little family is growing–a record player is on the way. The surface has to be longer than 70″ to fit it all.

Other unwanteds:

Here’s a best-of roundup, priced high to low. Each is wrong for us in some way (or costs more than a month’s rent), but they’re all gorgeous and might work for someone else. And frankly, I just needed this fulltime quest to result in something, if only a blog post.

The Seattle by Calligaris, an Italian company. Open-faced sandwich going on in the front, too bad. I was surprised to see Calligaris pieces sold online at both high-end sites like InMod.com, and low-end seeming places like racksandstacks.com. Online selling is such a zoo.

The Eldridge from Modloft. I love everything about this Knoll-ish piece--the flat walnut face, the slim steel legs--except the 59-inch width.

Hudson from Room & Board, basically a million dollars.

Even if you don't need a tv stand, even if you live in a yurt, go to Loadbearing.com and play with their create-your-own shelving maker. The colors are awesome and the units start affordably enough, but once you add drawers and shelves (and shipping), you end up selling your tv to buy the stand, so . . .

Again with the open face, plus no internal shelving. Also in three years will we cringe at the conceit of high-gloss white lacquer? We do live in Berkeley, not SoCal, and pearlescent doesn't jibe with the Arts and Crafts look so good.

In the summer of 2009, I was a Bloomberg fellow with the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, a cool program that funds experimental journalism by student reporters.

I served as lead designer and front-end/Flash developer for this 360-degree panorama about one intersection in Oakland.

(Warning: load time is sloooow. This was my first big interactive project, and, well, I’ve learned a lot since then. Still, it’s kind of fun once it’s up and running in your browser.)

Co-designer, front-end HTML/CSS coder for package about upscale street-food vendors in San Francisco.

I produced this audio slideshow for Oakland North with Howard Hsu, an awesome photographer.

Fun with jQuery plug-ins! I used a cool Javascript jQuery plugin to build this content slider for two Oakland North reporters.

I was the lead designer, front-end coder, and project manager for this package about a disappearing community of herring fishermen in San Francisco.

I produced this Vuvox about the lives of urban street trees when I was a fellow in the Carnegie-Knight News21 program.

Ok, NBC Bay Area gives you lame responses to choose from, but the feature itself has cool potential.

At the local news site I work for, Oakland North, the mission is to report stories that local readers want to read. Sounds simple. But since most of our reporters haven’t lived in Oakland or Alameda County very long–we’re grad students from all over the country, and world–there’s an inevitable getting-to-know-you period every semester. Plus, learning how to write and report in various formats is full-time work, so the addl’ work of outreach and audience engagement happens when it can.

So what if every Oakland North story came with a sidebar that asked, “What do you want us to report next?” and gave you a set of options that were chosen by the editor of the story.

Emphasis! On chosen by the editor! Because to begin with, most readers won’t know enough about X subject to articulate what they don’t know. But reporters and editors always leave a pile of reportage and leads on the newsroom floor–snippets that weren’t on-point or complete enough for the current story. Those snippets might get adopted into a story down the road, they might not. It’s kind of a fluke-y process.

Instead, putting those snippets online could become part of the daily workflow. Readers could take a look and choose. I’m thinking of DocumentCloud, which wants investigate reporters and watchdog journalists to submit their source documents to a public database after wrapping up a story. (Sitting in a drawer, I’ve got a pile of old FOIA’d paperwork from Chicago police departments and city agencies. Took me weeks to get some of that stuff, and I probably reported on ~40% of what’s inside.)

Maybe its a (slightly imperious) fantasy for news sites to try and “know” their readers’ whims/needs. Do readers know what they want? Does anybody? (Other than women, bc Wharton decided that one for us: “Heck naw!”) Still, as an editor/reporter, I’d be curious to see which stories got responses, and whether responded-to stories also tracked with high traffic, etc.

It’s about imposing boundaries for creativity to push up against, and seeing what blossoms under the pressure.

Also see: bonsai, Wired’s Very Short Stories contest (six words, science-fiction theme), nano reefs, and the 99 Ways to Tell a Radio Story experiment (”must include the following sounds: a pre-recorded voice, a rhythmic noise, and an exclamation (in that order)”).

At Right Now at 51st, we’re collecting messages sent in from people at the intersection of 51st and Telegraph streets in Temescal. Someone, I think a young person or a kid, sent in a text recently that struck me as a lovely model of creative constraint:

i’m with my cousins and my auntie, my aunt went to go cash her check so me and my cousins could go hang out at bay st. and maybe watch a movie.

For those unfamiliar with this spot in Temescal, there’s a check-cashing store on one corner of the intersection, and Bay Street is a high-end shopping corridor in Emeryville.

We got that text on a Saturday night, and it took me right back to being a kid and getting excited about my uncle taking my cousins and my brothers and me to the movies on sleepover weekends. All that, from a message small enough to fit in a text-message window.

We sit on the floor, legs folded under, and it’s surprisingly comfy that way. I crossed that mentality over to my workspace–I’ve never used a desk, always preferring the bed or the floor. This is terrible for both the neck and the productivity. You are always two degrees away from nerve damage and a nap. But the combo of stacks of crusty cereal bowls and $1000 laptops and uncapped pens finally proved unsustainable. Hence, the lovely new “ladder desk” leaning against one wall of our studio apt.

Problem is, having gone my entire professional life without one, I don’t have a clue how to arrange this space.

What to hang from the wall? What do I need close at hand? What cute little organizers and containers should I buy? Please help me!

Tell me: What is on your desk?