Why Designers Collect Weird Things
The hidden drawers of inspiration.
Edition #35
Hello Musies,
Step into a designer’s studio and you’ll always find something unusual. A drawer stuffed with door handles, a box of stone chips, shelves stacked with old sketchbooks, and a corner piled with models that should have been thrown out long ago.
We collect strange things. Pens, postcards, demolished bricks, subway tickets, even chair catalogues. Ask a designer about their stash and you’ll get a sheepish smile followed by a passionate explanation of why that scrap of wood or old tracing paper mattered enough to keep.
These collections aren’t clutter. They are fragments of memory and imagination. And if you trace them closely, you’ll see how they quietly shape the way we design.
✏️ The Pencil Drawer
Most designers can’t resist buying more pens or leads, even when they already have too many. The drawer fills up, but every piece carries the memory of long studio nights, site sketches, or that one jury where everything clicked.
🪵 The Material Box
On site visits, designers are often seen slipping a leftover tile, a stone chip, or a block of wood into their bags. Years later, when a client asks for a certain texture, that very chip resurfaces from the depths of the box. For us, materials are not just samples, they’re souvenirs of process.
🎒 The Strange Things Designers Actually Carry
Forget the pencils and sketchbooks, open a designer’s bag and you’ll probably find:
Half a brick wrapped in tissue paper
A tape measure that refuses to retract
Paint swatches from five different brands, none matching the project
A USB drive labeled “FINAL” that no computer recognizes
Business cards from vendors who don’t pick up anymore
Receipts from plotting shops rolled tighter than butter paper
A broken hinge “sample” that somehow ended up inside
Four half-used notebooks, each abandoned after 7 pages
It’s not a bag, it’s a traveling archive of unfinished thoughts and unfinished projects.
📸 The Odd Photo Albums
Our phone galleries look chaotic: hundreds of pictures of door hinges, stair corners, cracked plaster, shadows falling across ceilings. To outsiders, they’re meaningless. To us, they’re reference points, tiny notes stored for the day they’ll be useful.
📚 The Chair Obsession
Some designers obsessively collect chairs, or at least their catalogues. The fascination isn’t only with comfort, it’s about how an object can define posture, hierarchy, even a whole era. That’s why many studios have a “special chair” that nobody dares sit on.
🧳 Souvenirs of Travel
Most people bring back fridge magnets. Designers come back with metro tickets, museum maps, floor plans from exhibitions, and postcards of staircases. Travel is never just leisure, it’s a study of how places feel, and these souvenirs are footnotes in that ongoing lesson.
🛠 Tools That Outlast Projects
Every designer keeps that one battered scale, chipped set square, or drafting brush that somehow survives every spring-clean. They’re no longer tools, but reminders of the nights we learned to think like designers.
🌱 Why We Collect
When you look at it all together, the so-called “weird” collections form a personal archive. They are reminders of projects, fragments of references, and tokens of the rituals that shaped us. They may look random, but they’re invisible threads tying together our design journey.
So when you see a designer pull out a stone chip, photograph a stair corner, or hoard yet another pen, they’re not just being eccentric. They’re archiving, building, remembering.
Because design doesn’t begin at the drawing board. It begins with the fragments we choose to notice, carry, and keep.
What’s in Your Bag?
Designers carry strange treasures everywhere, extra pencils, broken hinges, crumpled swatches, maybe even half a brick.
👉 Open your bag right now.
👉 If you find any of today’s “weird designer items,” hit Reply to this email and confess.
I’ll share the funniest replies in the next edition 👀
Until next week,
Keep Musing,
Ar. Sagar Saoji
Founder - f.y.i.arch
Architect turned Content Creator
Find me here: Instagram | Linkedin | Website
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This reminded me that I have to organise my pencil drawer.
And I can show this article to my mom who gives me a glare everytime I bring pieces of laminates, panels,marbles, wooden blocks, etc to home 😂