Designing Berlin as a Series of Objects

We don’t experience cities as a whole.
We remember them through fragments.

A metro ride. A street sign. A kebab. A flea market.

This project started with a simple question:
What if a city could be captured as a collection of everyday objects?

Using AI as a medium, I created a miniature series of Berlin by isolating familiar elements—a yellow metro, a Photoautomat booth, a Sonnenallee street sign, a döner kebab, even a public trash bin—and treating them as collectible artifacts. By placing these objects inside minimal, almost toy-like packaging, they shift from being ordinary to something more intentional, almost like they’ve been curated or preserved.

What interested me most was how framing changes perception. The same objects we overlook in daily life start to feel meaningful when we pause and look at them differently. It becomes less about the object itself and more about the feeling or memory attached to it.

AI helped generate the visuals, but the choices were still deliberate—what to include, what feels representative, and what captures the character of a place. In the end, it leaves a simple thought: if you had to remember a city through just a few objects, what would you keep?