Michael Shi's white minimal desk setup — Shanghai

Invest in plenty of cable management tools as hiding cables is crucial.

Michael Shi's Shanghai desk sits at a window, curtains and all, with a Hexcal Studio shelf riser doing the work of organizing a genuinely enormous inventory: a Nixie-tube clock, an open-frame liquid-cooled PC with its GPU on full display, and a rotating cast of Xbox controllers charging in their stands. A curved ultrawide monitor anchors the middle, lit by a single slim desk lamp overhead.

Underneath the shelf, a translucent keyboard glows against the desk surface next to a compact MIDI-style controller and a stream deck — the layered under-desk setup reads as a workstation built for switching contexts fast, not settling on one. Wireless charging pucks and phone stands are scattered across the shelf, evidence of a multi-device workflow that never fully powers down.

For someone managing this much hardware, Shi's own advice tracks: invest in cable management before anything else, because a setup this dense only stays usable if the wiring disappears.