Operating economically (as do the entire hard-working and resourceful Experimenta team), my plan is to exploit Lisbon's fantastic resource of small, often quite eccentric museums and institutions. Taking a bunch of idiosyncratic collections - at the moment I am working with seven - I am going to lodge them for two months inside a handful of the city's finest hidden treasures. So far it's working beautifully, with all the potential host institutions lining up neatly along the route of the famous no.28 tram. From the geological museum at one end, to the decorative arts museum at the other, the trail runs from stone-age flints, to ancient Egyptian pharmaceutical equipment, through a Roman amphitheatre and into a heavily furnished formal salon. The matieral that I will be bringing to these places is yet to be finalised. Come to Lisbon this autumn and take a look!

Putting a collection of one kind inside that of another raises questions about acquisition, ordering and display, and how these activities shape our understanding of both the past and the present. This is an especially pointed exercise in Lisbon, where there seems to be a very particular sense of how things are gathered and shown. Walking through the city hunting down the perfect venue to exhibit this or that, I am constantly coming across sources of inspiration.

A well-known Lisbon favourite, on the shopping street Rua do Carmo, is the glove shop Luvaria Ulisses. Lodged in a space little bigger than its doorway, it displays the stock in neatly formed chevrons, women's gloves on the left, men's on the right. There is a sense of abundance and variety that belies the shop's tiny size.

On the theme of abundance and variety, often Lisbon's liquor sellers shun any notion of the latter, in favour of an emphasis on the former. You can buy anything you want here, as long as it's Ginjnha, a sour cherry liquor.

And here bottles throng in orderly lines against the window, creating a picturesque crush against the window, a lack of space that dispels fear of famine.

But even when there aren't enough bottles to fill a window, Lisbon's drinks sellers make sure what they have is attractively arranged. Fruit juice presented Busby Berkeley style.

And my favourite, outside a hardware shop, a piece of three-dimensional information design that delivers its message in a blunt but effective fashion.

Curating a design show is a business of using objects to tell a story about culture. It is an activity of many stages - deciding on the story, choosing the objects, editing the objects and so on - but it always boils down to the final moment when you're moving things just a little bit to the left or to the right in the display case or on the gallery wall. Come next September, if I am lost for inspiration about just how things should sit, I will be able to walk out in the streets of Lisbon and put myself right. In terms of tweaking objects to look just so, the city's shopkeepers are the most talented in the world.

And now the shoe bit: in spite of the 28 tram, both making and visiting the exhibition are going to take a lot of walking. Lisbon's streets are not only steep, but also can be extremely slippery. Before September I must get around to re-soling my trusted, but now quite knackered Saddled O's.