From Commission to Method

Take One Object (Errázuriz and Martínez, forthcoming) is a collective experiment in ethnographic attention. Forty-one anthropologists were invited to write about a single domestic object drawn from their everyday surroundings. The resulting objectographies follow blankets, vinyl records, lamps, chairs, fridges, jars, and other ordinary things as they become entangled in memory, care, routine, and domestic life.

I was invited to illustrate the volume. That invitation could have been approached as a straightforward commission: one image per essay, each accompanying a specific object. But I was less interested in depicting domestic things as stable forms than in finding a way to translate the essays’ textures, gestures, and relations into another medium. I saw the invitation as an opportunity to explore how illustration might do more than mirror ethnographic description. Could it become a way of reading, selecting, and reworking ethnographic material?

What emerged was Speculative Manuals: a multimodal experiment in situated translation. Rather than depicting objects as stable forms, I translated each essay into the visual grammar of the instruction manual—arrows, exploded views, schematic hands, numbered steps, and sequential panels. Through repeated reading, sketching, digital vectoring, and revision, illustration became a way of turning ethnographic prose into diagrams, and objects into operations, relations, and possible futures.

The form was no arbitrary inspiration. I have been quietly but compulsively collecting instruction manuals for years—those slim booklets tucked into electronics boxes, flat-pack furniture, or clothing labels. What fascinates me is that manuals do not simply describe objects; they evoke relations with them. They imagine how life will unfold around a thing: how a body will bend, where a hand will reach, what order matters, and what might go wrong. In this sense, manuals are both descriptive and prescriptive. They tell us what to do, in what sequence, and under what conditions.

That made them especially productive as a model for illustrating objectographies. The essays in Take One Object are not simply about what domestic things are, but about what they permit, organize, remember, delay, and require. Manuals offered a way of shifting attention from the object as a stable form to the object as a set of operations, attachments, gestures, failures, and possible repairs. Their visual grammar—schematic hands, directional icons, warning icons, numbered stages—resonates with anthropological efforts to diagram relations and movement (Latour 1986; Ingold 2011).

There is also an STS lineage here: manuals do not merely explain technical objects, but script relations between bodies, devices, and forms of action (Akrich and Boullier 1991; Boullier 1992). Treating illustration itself as an epistemological and analytical practice (Causey 2016; Douglas-Jones 2021) extends this possibility: It diagrams not only what one should do, but what an object asks, what kinds of care and labor gather around it, and what kinds of trouble remain latent within its use.

The attraction was as literary as it was graphic. Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1987) long ago suggested to me that the manual could exceed its technical function and become an organizing principle for narrating domestic worlds. What interested me here was moving that intuition across media: taking the manual not as a metaphor in writing, but as a visual and material form through which ethnographic essays might be reworked. In that sense, Speculative Manuals was transmedial from the start. It treated the instruction manual as a genre through which to test what happens when anthropology is translated into steps, elements, diagrams, and sequences.

Making the Manuals

My task was to create one illustration for each essay in Take One Object, but the method of translation was not obvious: How could an illustration capture not simply the appearance of an object, but the relations, gestures, temporalities, and habits through which it became ethnographically meaningful? The instruction manual offered a way to do this—rendering objects not as finished forms but as sequences, arrangements, and operations.

The finished manual illustrations were only the most visible part of the process. Behind each one was the slow labor of rereading, selecting, grouping, discarding, and rendering prose into visual sequences. Each essay required several readings: one to grasp its movement, another to identify what I began calling its “mechanisms”—details that kept it moving, like hinges, screws, or invisible joints. These were not always literal. They could be repeated gestures, remembered uses, relations of care, temporal rhythms, or latent breakdowns. From each essay, I usually extracted ten or twelve such elements, then narrowed them to six: enough to build a sequence, but also limited so as to resist the illusion of completeness.

The jam jar—contributed by Sophie Woodward—offered a useful test case because its significance in the essay lay less in what it did than in how it remained: dormant, ordinary, and yet still charged with care. The object was an empty Kilner-style jam jar on a kitchen shelf, with a metal clip lid, a fading orange rubber seal, and a handwritten label reading Apple Jelly, October 2014. On my first readings, I noted more elements than the final sequence could hold: form, label, shelf placement, emptiness, aging materials, possible reuse, and family memory. What eventually emerged were six illustrated panels: handwritten label, dormancy, surrounding shelf context, signs of aging, intergenerational memory, and potential future. Instead of showing how the jar functions mechanically, the manual had to diagram a more difficult condition: its suspended function.

Documentation became part of this practice of translation. To render hands, I photographed my own or borrowed my partner’s. To diagram a chair, grill, or jar, I searched for reference images or staged quick photographs at home. My phone gradually filled with an archive of gestures, props, angles, and surfaces. These images were not merely auxiliary references for drawing. They formed part of a situated process of ethnographic translation: a way of testing how written objectographies could be reimagined as sequences of handling, orientation, assembly, storage, and use.

This was akin to what Gatt and Ingold (2013) call correspondence, a practice of moving alongside materials, adjusting and being adjusted by them. Manual-making became a secondary inquiry, one learned through material reworking. By converting objects into panels, steps, and gestures, I was not documenting practice after the fact so much as probing what kinds of action, relation, latency, and trouble the objectography could still sustain when translated into diagrammatic form.

The jar made this especially clear. Photographing my own hand holding a similar jar helped me understand that part of the object’s ethnographic force did not reside in its shape alone, but in its handling: gripping, unlatching, opening, placing, keeping, and withholding from reuse. The photographs also made visible the jar’s translucent materiality, its scale, and the relation between hand, lid, possible label, and container—details that became crucial once the essay had to be translated into a sequence rather than a static image. My notebook sketches remained exploratory and unresolved, still trying out proportions, labels, lids, and possible contents. The digital draft began to impose another order, converting the jar from an object-study into a manual panel. Following the jar from staged photograph to notebook sketch, digital draft, and final manual made visible what the project taught me: manual-making did not simply stylize ethnographic material; it re-specified it.

As I moved from one manual to the next, the drawings themselves began to change. The early illustrations were simpler and more tentative; later diagrams became denser, more layered, and formally more assured. I chose not to smooth out that unevenness. Across the volume, a careful reader can trace not only the domestic lives of objects, but my own apprenticeship in the form. What changed was not just style, but understanding: repeated translation taught me to see objects less as bounded things than as fields of latent action—held together by habit, care, and the possibility of breakdown. The process was iterative in this sense. Each manual sent me back to the essay, to earlier sketches, and often to the object itself, refining what could be sequenced, what had to be omitted, and what kinds of action the diagram could plausibly sustain. Mika Pantzar’s chair offered a clear case for this claim: His essay established that one leg was missing but did not indicate which one. I drew it wrong twice before a photograph shared during the second round of corrections finally located the absence. The diagram had made a demand the prose had never needed to answer.

Sometimes revision extended the conceptual into the compositional. The manuals were never stable outputs simply extracted from text—they had to be recalibrated again and again, and each recalibration exposed decisions that had seemed settled. When I changed the two-color palette midway through the project, for instance, the redrawing that followed revealed that certain compositional choices had been carrying more chromatic weight than structural logic: some panels only cohered because of how color masked weak sequencing. The labor was repetitive and exhausting across eight or nine diagrams, but analytically revealing. Long hours of tracing, aligning, simplifying, and redrawing made visible a form of production hidden behind finished images, reminding me that the manual translated not only domestic action, but the endurance and repetition required to diagram it.

Speculative Sequences

What emerged were not illustrations as explanations in the conventional sense, but speculative translations. Speculation here is understood in the sense developed by Wilkie, Savransky, and Rosengarten (2017): not arbitrary invention, but a practice oriented toward possible futures that are not yet closed down but instead tentative, open-ended, and committed to what might still become. A fridge drawn as a gravitational hub, a blanket as a relay of hands, a jam jar as suspended function: These were not portraits of domestic objects so much as diagrammatic propositions about how they gather life around them. Speculation here is not free association. It names a method of arranging selected elements—gestures, uses, relations, temporalities—into a sequence without claiming to exhaust the object. The manual became a way of holding these elements together while leaving their meaning open.

Framing my process as speculative translation reveals an especially generative affordance of the instructional manual. A classic manual follows a chain of operations: assemble, tighten, fold, store, repair. My manuals borrowed that sequential logic, but often redirected it toward less predictable chains of action and relation, recalling what Leroi-Gourhan (1993) described as a chaîne opératoire while also stretching it toward dormancy, memory, and possible futures. The jam jar, for example, did not resolve into a simple functional sequence such as open, fill, close, and store. Instead, its panels moved through label, dormancy, shelf context, aging, intergenerational memory, and potential future. What the manual sequenced was not technical use alone, but a domestic object’s continued life in latency. In that sense, the manuals did not reconstruct a whole; they proposed a provisional order for relations that prose had dispersed across anecdote, memory, gesture, and material detail.

This is also why I think of them as prototype-like (Corsín Jiménez 2014). For Corsín Jiménez, a prototype is neither a finished object nor a mere draft: It is something that is more than many and less than one, open, generative, and designed to invite further work rather than foreclose it. The manuals share this quality. Not because every viewer would immediately see the full process of translation behind them, but because the final images retain a certain incompleteness. They do not present objects as singular and settled forms. Instead, they break them into operations, states, and points of contact; they juxtapose use with non-use, function with dormancy, care with wear, and present action with possible future action. Their seams are visible precisely in their sequentiality: Each panel isolates one condition or relation, and the sequence as a whole resists closure. What the manuals offer, then, is not a finished account of domestic objects, but an unfinished infrastructure for thinking with them.

Taken together, these manuals suggest that illustration can do more than accompany ethnography. It can become a way of reworking ethnographic writing through sequence, selection, and design. In that sense, Speculative Manuals is less a set of images than an invitation: to treat visual translation as inquiry and to test how anthropology might think through other graphic genres and procedures of attention.