On the cabinet of curiosities.
A short essay on wunderkammern, the long history of keeping wonderful things, and what it means to make one now.
In the late sixteenth century, a kind of room began to appear in the homes of European naturalists, physicians, and minor aristocrats. They called it the Wunderkammer — the cabinet of wonders. Not a cabinet in the modern sense of a piece of furniture, but a whole room: shelves and drawers and walls dense with shells, fossils, coral, antlers, manuscripts, miniature paintings, optical instruments, the occasional supposed unicorn horn.
The point of a Wunderkammer wasn't science, exactly. The taxonomies were imaginative. Things that didn't belong together — a Roman coin and a hummingbird, a celestial globe and a piece of stitched-up coral — sat shoulder to shoulder. The keeper was making a microcosm: a small version of the world, ordered by their own attention.
What you put in your cabinet said something about you. Not just your wealth, though that mattered too. The shape of the collection — what you noticed, what you kept, how you arranged it — was a kind of self-portrait. It was the keeper's mind, made into a room.
Four hundred years later, we're back in the business of curating. Most of what we make now is digital, and most of it disappears. A document goes into a folder and is never opened again. A clever little tool gets sent in a Slack message and is forgotten by Tuesday. The clever ideas, the half-experiments, the things we built to think with — they don't have anywhere to live.
A wunder is a small, self-contained interactive document. A calculator, a journey, a dashboard, a story. The kind of thing you used to send around as a one-off and lose track of by next quarter. Wunder is a place to keep them.
A few principles, since this is a manifesto.
Each wunder is whole.
One file. No accounts to view it. No platform that goes away. The link is the document and the document is the link.
The collection is the artwork.
What you choose to keep, and how you arrange it, says more than any single piece. Cabinets are curated, not crammed.
Yours, until you decide otherwise.
A wunder lives privately by default. You decide what to share, when, and with whom. Privacy is not the exception; it's the start.
Strange neighbours encouraged.
The patient journey next to the pricing calculator next to the half-broken experiment. The juxtapositions are where the thinking happens.
Slow is fine.
A cabinet doesn't fill quickly, and shouldn't. The good ones accumulate over years. Don't rush.
The Wunderkammer eventually became the museum — institutional, public, organised by department. Something was gained and something was lost. The new kind of museum could hold more, and let more people in. But the cabinet, the keeper's particular cabinet, was always something else. It was personal in a way that institutions can't be.
Wunder is meant to feel like the personal kind. A space that's small, that's yours, that holds the things you've made and the things you want to remember you made. A microcosm of your work. A self-portrait, slowly assembled.
Make a few. Share what you want. Keep the rest. Come back in a year and see what you've collected.
Welcome to your cabinet.
Composed in Fraunces & Inter