Collection Room

Every museum begins with a collection, and so does every life.

The things we gather first are rarely grand or deliberate. They are odd scraps that end up in drawers, on shelves, in boxes tucked under beds. A concert wristband, a hotel soap, a seashell, a button that no longer has a coat. These objects do not make sense to anyone else, but to the person who keeps them, they are anchors. They remind us not just of what happened, but how it felt to be there.

Psychologists call this cue-dependent memory: a small object can bring back an entire scene more vividly than words alone. A ticket stub can conjure the laughter of an evening. A stone can bring back the sound of the sea. Thing theorist Bill Brown writes that we often look through objects until they suddenly catch our attention again – charged with memory, heavy with feeling. It is at that moment, when an object stops being simply useful or ordinary and becomes noticed, remembered, or felt, that it turns into a thing. Anthropologist Daniel Miller notes, “the things we keep are the things that keep us.”

Things we keep
Fragments of ordinary days that remind us who we’ve been.

Objects of belonging
Familiar anchors that make new places feel like home.

Keepsakes and memories
Small containers of love, loss, and lived time.

Curator’s Lens for Organisations

What an organisation keeps is never neutral.
Over time, accumulated choices become culture.

Much of this happens quietly, beneath strategy decks and transformation plans, until someone pauses long enough to notice what is already shaping behaviour.

In organisations, collections often appear as:

  • habits no one remembers choosing

  • processes inherited from earlier chapters

  • artefacts that stabilise culture or quietly constrain it

  • the unspoken rules of how things are done here

Before change initiatives, before strategy resets, before learning programmes begin, there is always a collection already in place.

Curatology helps organisations surface that collection so they can decide, intentionally, what should continue to shape the future.

What is your organisation already carrying?