The Art of Curation

“To be a good curator, it's important to…be open to what you don't know and to be looking for people to tell you what the new important ideas are instead of going out and saying, I think I know what matters.” — Corey Hajim, TED Business Curator She didn’t know it while it was unfolding, but when you look back at Corey Hajim’s career trajectory, it makes sense that she became the business curator a...

“Ever since I was at Amazon, I've been intrigued by the way in which discovery needs to be a bit more than search, and how curation is almost the flipside of knowing what you want…Helping you identify what you would get delight from is very often the result of curation.” — Spencer Hyman As a “craft chocolate DJ” who runs a subscription service called Cocoa Runners, Spencer Hyman has plenty to say...

“I’ve learned how to choose the people who have the most interesting voices and stories and not just the ones that make $500,000 a year…I've really learned to mine for story and interesting tidbits and different kinds of people.” — Hannah Rimm If you’ve ever read a Money Diary on Refinery29, you know they’re fascinating and a little bit addictive. Initially, it’s the scenario that draws you in; he...

“Sometimes in the Jewish imagination, but definitely in the broader public imagination, people reduce all of Jewish history to the Holocaust. And so I think one of the responsibilities that curators have is to show the rich panoply of Jewish experience beyond just 1939-1945…and to create access points to those histories.” — Jason Steinhauer  History Club founder Jason Steinhauer is a curator with...

“The moment we opened our doors, the project belonged to everybody else who's interacting with it. It’s [now] about serving those people and their engagement with things. A lot of curation is also about listening and continuing to change your perspective and accept things that you didn't know or understand before you started on the journey you're on.” — Matthew James-Wilson, Heavy Manners Library...

“The best preachers are able to say, here's this timeless principle — like humility or forgiveness or racial reconciliation — and then look around and say, ‘In what areas are our people uniquely challenged to live by this principle?’ That's where the curation comes in, where you're reading the news and trying to find the pressure points where people are struggling and really press in there.” — Dan...

“What the internet really needed was a great curator; someone who would read and select and present the finest pieces to you so that you could ignore the noise and get straight to the quality.” — Uri Bram, The Browser Mission accomplished. If you subscribe to The Browser , you can rest easy knowing that a steady stream of fascinating pieces you didn’t know you wanted to read will flow effortlessly...

“We really want to help people discover music that can help them feel a particular set of feelings in a way that we believe is incredibly potent. For me personally, that’s kind of my guiding light in how I decide on what music actually stands out and what music will be able to touch many people from within.” — Jonathan Tzou Jonathan Tzou lives at the intersection of music, curation and entrepreneu...

“A top-down view is: someone's going to tell me what's cool, and that's not how it works anymore. It's trickle up, where the curator is the one who builds the audience and curates what's cool. If the audience comes, it comes from the community. And that's why it's really exciting: it doesn't rely on someone who has status or money to make these things reach scale.” — Gaby Goldberg When people talk...

“We're not trying to pick something that fits our subscribers’ tastes and interests. In a way, we're sort of doing the opposite: the point of Stack is that you come to us because you want to be exposed to things that you wouldn't have come upon yourself.” — Steve Watson, Stack Steve Watson is the ultimate magazine curator. As the founder and curator of Stack , he is responsible for curating the wo...

“I want to democratize the idea of collecting so that it's not only for people who have a lot of money who collect ancient artifacts or shoes or expensive watches. You can collect ideas, artists, and favorite things…” — Julia Lu, The Collector If you spend any time on Flipboard, you’ll likely see The Collector ’s Storyboards pass through your feeds. And if they don’t catch your eye visually, they’...

“It has to feel like it's a creation, not just a collection. That keeps you from getting burned out, because if you're passionate about what you're making, then you wake up the next morning and you just need to push that publish button.” — Dave Pell If you’re a news(letter) connoisseur, then you likely already know — and love — NextDraft . Every weekday, at around 12pm PT, a new edition delights t...

“I always get really excited when someone who has access to any possible new piece of clothing buys something from the past that we've chosen. That's a really exciting step forward for vintage. It's the most ethical way of shopping, and chances are no one else is going to have the same thing that you have.” — Brandon Veloria Giordano of James Veloria If you’ve ever trekked to the James Veloria vin...

“The Latin term 'cura' means ‘concern’ or ‘study’ or figuring out different approaches to pulling together things. It also relates to healing, which I find kind of amusing, that the term ‘cure’ and ‘curator’ are tangentially associated. Like you're healing by pulling together information.” — DJ Spooky Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, is the ultimate creator: he’s a composer, a DJ, a multimedia artist,...

“I came to realize, over 20 years, that food was much more important than what you cooked for dinner or what cool ingredient you were into or what groovy restaurant you’re going to. And gradually what I wrote about...became the bigger picture in food. I don't want to leave cooking behind; cooking matters. But it's a small part of the food picture and talking about that is really important to us.”...

“What really makes an incredible curator in science is what makes an incredible curator of anything. A lot of that is thinking deeply about the experience.” — Jennifer Frazier The Exploratorium is a beloved, hands-on museum in San Francisco, where science isn’t just something to learn about; it’s something to be uncovered and discovered as a kind of personal journey. No one knows this better than...