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The mise en place of product design

How to organize your design files in a way that mirrors the design process, creates visibility into our work, and highlights the strategic value of product design.

Katie Jacquez
UX Collective
8 min readNov 25, 2022
A birds eye view of an organized desk and workspace
Photo by UX Store on Unsplash

At the start of each work day, I clean my immediate physical space. It’s my version of ‘mise en place’; a French culinary phrase which means “putting in place” or “gather”. Professional chefs use mise en place because it optimizes their work for speed and efficiency. It’s also a term used by psychologists and refers to:

“how a given environment places constraints on what one feels able to do within that environment, and how these assessments and predispositions impact the process of preparing to act.” Wikipedia

Organizing my physical space helps me mentally and physically prepare for the day’s work. The same rule applies to the digital spaces I work in.

When I first started out in design I was curious about what other product designers’ art boards looked like. How did they organize their digital workspaces? In the spirit of helping others just starting out or those with small design teams, I’m sharing how I break down my design files and what I’ve learned after 5 years working as a designer within a UX design and research team of over 300…

Published in UX Collective

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Written by Katie Jacquez

Writes about product design, career shifting, and technology. Senior product designer @LinkedIn // Masters of IXD // Career shifter // Photographer

Responses (6)

What are your thoughts?

I enjoyed your perspective on AI and your insightful points! Defining intelligence is indeed challenging given our limited understanding of it. That's why I prefer to refer to specific technologies by their names rather than using a blanket term…

I can agree with most affirmations. But...
Ain't humans math, as well?
Ain't humans as good as the data they’re trained on?
Ain't the human mind built on information tha't s been evolving through eons?