My Master’s thesis explored a cultural practice that has accompanied humanity for millennia: collecting. From prehistoric hoarding for survival to modern watch enthusiasts exchanging knowledge in online communities, collecting has evolved into a deeply cultural and symbolic activity.

The work examines three dimensions:

• History: From ancient treasure chambers and medieval Wunderkammern to modern museums and hobby culture, collecting developed from necessity into a form of knowledge and cultural preservation.
• Culture: Collecting is not simply owning; it is a process of searching, preserving, categorizing, and presenting. Collections create meaning through context, representation, and narrative.
• Motives: Objects are collected for practical, aesthetic, economic, and symbolic reasons. Watches, as a central case study, embody all these functions – as tools, as aesthetic artifacts, as stores of value, and as symbols of identity and memory.

The project was not only a written thesis but also a book design. My goal was to create a visual form that reflects the content of the research: the book itself becomes a kind of collection. A visible grid structure provides order, echoing the systematic nature of collecting. Collages throughout the book visually embody the act of collecting: searching, selecting, cutting, rearranging, and combining fragments into new constellations. In this way, the design does not merely illustrate the topic – it performs it.

This dual approach – academic research and design execution – allowed me to show how form and content can reinforce each other. The book is both an analytical study of collecting and a designed object that stages collecting as a cultural practice in its very structure.

For me as a designer, this project was a milestone: it taught me to connect research, storytelling, and visual systems into a coherent whole – skills I now apply when designing products, brand narratives, or entire collections.