Michael Shi's white minimal desk setup — Shanghai
Invest in plenty of cable management tools as hiding cables is crucial.
- Contributor
- Michael Shi
- Role
- Designer
- Place
- Shanghai
- Year
- 2025
- Use
- Content / creative
- Display
- Ultrawide
- Source
- wdsf-2025-1899661278609633281
More2
- Room
- 15 square meter
- Budget
- Confidential
Gear list27 items · includes affiliate links
Some links are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Beyond Desk earns from qualifying purchases.
- Laptop
- Lenovo Legion 7i (r9000k)2021 Macbook air 13 inch 2018 Surface book 14 inch 2019 (opens in new tab)
- Laptop stand
- Brateck E700 Grey (opens in new tab)
- Monitor light
- Cololight Strip 2m (opens in new tab)
- Keyboard cable
- Unknown error / Geekcable
- Desk lamp
- Cololight (opens in new tab)
- External storage
- WD p40 2TB / Seagate FAST 500GB (opens in new tab)
- Headphones
- AirPods pro / Angrymiao Cyberblade / FIIL cc pro2 / songx 06 x2 / songx 07 x2 (opens in new tab)
- Phone
- iphone 15 pro max / iphone 13 pro / iphone xs max / iphone 8 plus / iphone 6s (opens in new tab)
- MIDI controller
- Arturia Keylab 61 MKII (opens in new tab)

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In their own words
Invest in plenty of cable management tools as hiding cables is crucial. Enjoy the journey!
— Michael Shi
Observation notes
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.




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