I have been thinking recently about the odd, sort of beautiful collections people amass when they claim as their own some small subset of human experience. I like what people's objects can say about their owners. Myself, I keep a small collection of mailed postcards I have found while wandering around thrift stores – limited only to those messages that include intimate revelations. Not the kind that end up on PostSecret, whose very intention was public all along, nor the kind that your parents or friends write from business trips abroad. Rather, these are postcards sent decades ago, with declarations of love or sadness that seem ill-suited to their public placement. Why not write these things in letters, secrets conveyed from one to another within the privacy of an envelope? Personal thoughts, intended for personal communication, doubly exposed by their form and their fate.

So I am showing here a few other collections I have come across recently, oddities that prize the close observation of a specific feature of life. The first is a collection of shivs, posted at designobserver.com. Prison weapons fashioned from the everyday objects that are accessible to inmates, they are equal parts violence, simplicity, and beauty. A part of life that we might not otherwise access, they are fascinating to behold. Another focuses on a more familiar design problem, cataloguing the variety of forms used as coffee cup lids. This is an issue very dear to me, and one that deserves more consideration – I recently had to switch neighborhood cafes when a particular combination of lid and cup made drinking my usual coffee near-impossible while in motion. One of those small details that describes a day.

Image from cabinetmagazine.org