I am a big fan of Permaculture Design, applied at any scale: it is a way of understand natural and man-made systems and applying design principles that foster improved function, efficiency and sustainability. I have talked about The Natural Step here before: they simplified Permaculture into four simple questions – providing an operational definition of sustainability. Feng Shui (minus all the religious and philosophical trappings) is, essentially, the same kind of thing. Whatever the discipline, the objectives are mainly inline.
Here the issue of clutter and the research on how that fits into the picture is discussed at length. The Asian elegance shows through immediately. Simpler is always better in my view:-)