Redrawing design experiences: (Auto)ethnographies with visual diagrams at a Danish makerlab

Visual images have great power as creative devices to “world”—that is, pull social realities into the frame of existence and maintain them. This article investigates this power through diagrams, understood as producers of knowledge and interventionist drawing processes. An ethnography at a Danish makerlab reveals which social realities are represented by diagrams, who produces them, for whom they are intended, and to what ends, while an autoethnography of a photographic event details how the diagram-drawing process can itself produce a social reality, as well as how that process becomes entangled with the cultural consequences of representing lived realities. By redrawing diagrams from the field, light is shed on wider cultural structures and mechanisms of knowledge production shaped by diagrams and other visual images. Finally, drawing is presented as an active verbs-strategy that addresses broader anthropological questions of knowledge production and reworlding for a relational politics that is specific to the culture, time, and place contexts of many worlds.