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This chapter surveys the role that professional home organizing played in the social construction of hoarding as a mental illness. It argues that organizers normalize the hoarder and present the hoarder’s lifestyle as a form of abnormal untidiness. Exploring how these organizers and their self-help books often treat hoarding as an addiction to clutter, the chapter claims that these professionals represent improper housekeeping as a mental illness once called Messy House syndrome or Pack Rat syndrome. Tracing how earlier worries over household hygiene influenced contemporary professional organizing, the chapter then charts how organizers depict excessive clutter as a moral panic over inappropriate household goods. Using the works of professional homer organizer Sandra Felton as its main case study, the chapter finally suggests that the beliefs of professional organizers have been embraced by scientific experts as both treat hoarding as a mental illness in need of assessment and cure.

This chapter addresses the puzzling fact that although business innovation is often decoupled from the market to which it purport to refer, this decoupling has only partially undermined the perception of its value in and outside the business world. The reason lies in innovators’ efforts to signal to clients by means of different performative practices that “innovation is now taking place.” The chapter argues that innovators use specific material artifacts and communicative practices to mediate the notion that their expertise is based in the ideals of flexibility, speed, minimalism, free information flow, and organizational creativity. However, these acts of mediation also have unintended consequences. They clutter the work of innovation and create centers of gravity, opacity, and rigidness. In other words, they both mediate and undermine the ideals with which innovators would like to be associated. The chapter explores this contradiction as it finds expression in innovators’ efforts to mediate their workspace, expertise, thought processes, and selves as organizationally creative.

Mise-en-cadre means “placed within the frame.” Filmmakers have exploited the use of screen positions over the course of whole movies. This chapter presents examples of how luminance, motion, and clutter are distributed across movies. In each case, the center of the screen is most important. It has the most light, the most motion, and the least amount of clutter in the frame, and this is where viewers have a strong tendency to look when watching a movie. The chapter then explains shot scale, a measure of the size of characters in the image, and notes that filmmakers strongly tend to place their characters’ faces at or near midscreen, regardless of scale, reinforcing the gaze tendencies of viewers. Moreover, when they do not, filmmakers follow the focal content of one shot with the screen placement of the focal content of the next shot.

This chapter considers the motivations behind Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood, his non-fiction novel about the murder of the Clutters, a farm family in Kansas. Capote got the idea for the book after coming across a one-column item about the murders in The New York Times in 1959, a year after the release of Breakfast at Tiffany 's. Capote's initial intention was to write a relatively modest piece, focusing only on the echoes of the murders within the tiny Holcomb community. But writing In Cold Blood represented a different kind of challenge.

Interacting ems need not see exactly the same virtual environment. For example, each em might prefer to see a shared environment as decorated with their personal choices of colors or patterns. Ems might also prefer to overlay or augment their views of the virtual world with useful tags and statistics, or to see through virtual objects to see object components or to see what lies behind those objects. Virtual ems may have telescopic sight, allowing them to always vividly see anything anywhere they are allowed to view. However, overlays can impair perception, and so must be used carefully ( Sabelman and Lam 2015 ). To sensibly interact with others, ems usually want easy ways to quickly identify the aspects of their environments that they and their interaction partners see similarly. Some aspects of these worlds (such as where people are standing) are distinguished as shared by default, and interacting ems want standard ways to invite interaction partners to see some of their own less widely shared overlays and changes, and to accept such offers from others. At both work and play, many kinds of tasks require ems to manage physical systems. Such management often requires physical bodies (both immediate and extended) whose size, speed, shape, and materials sufficiently match those physical systems. It is also important for em minds to relate well to such bodies. But this seems feasible for a wide range of physical bodies. After all, people today interact with the world using a wide range of machines, such as vehicles and cranes, which they treat mentally as an extension of their bodies. For ems with task-matched physical bodies, the world they see and hear needn’t be an exact faithful representation of their physical world. For example, it might often be a sort of view like those in today’s head-up displays, overlaid with useful virtual annotations. But such overlays need to avoid overly obscuring important elements of that physical world. Because the feasibility, cost, and security of em interactions often depends on the physical and organizational locations of their brains and the brains of others, em virtual worlds may continually show such information about interaction partners. For example, ems often want to know when another em’s speed, period, phase, or distance makes direct fast interaction infeasible. So ems will need to share somewhat-realistic concepts of their locations in space and time.