Week 6 (Methods of translating Week 1)

This week I began my exploration of the IKEA instruction manual as a visual language. I chose this publication because it’s so familiar, so ordinary, and so aggressively neutral.

This week helped me clarify where my enquiry was heading:

• I’m interested in translating IKEA’s universal visual language into forms it wasn’t designed for
• My experiments helped me see that IKEA manuals and self-help/emotion frameworks overlap more than I expected– they both promise structure, clarity, and a path toward “fixing” or “assembling” something.

By the end of Week 1, my project shifted from simply mimicking IKEA to asking a bigger question:

How can the visual language of universal instruction be reimagined as a tool for emotion, belief, or storytelling?

Week 7 (Methods of translating week 2)

Coming into Week 2, I started expanding my enquiry from simply mimicking IKEA diagrams to exploring how the logic of the manual could be stretched, broken, or reinterpreted to handle things it was never designed to explain. My Week 1 experiments showed me that IKEA’s visual language collapses when it tries to translate intangible concepts , and that collapse became the most interesting part of the project.

This week was about pushing that collapse further.

One of the biggest difficulties this week was realising that my project was pulling me in two completely different conceptual directions, and I wasn’t sure how to reconcile them.

option 1: Tarot

Tarot appealed to me because:

• it’s ambiguous,
• it relies on symbolic interpretation,
• it invites intuition rather than instruction,
• and it allows meaning to shift depending on the reader.

Conceptually, tarot is the polar opposite of an IKEA manual

option 2: self-help books

When I looked into the language and structure of self-help books, they actually aligned surprisingly well with IKEA’s logic:

• step-by-step improvement
• emotional “fixing”
• belief that following instructions leads to a better outcome

This made the IKEA x self-help direction much more coherent than the tarot path

At one point, I tried to merge tarot and IKEA into a single system (Which is why my manuals have names such as THE ALIGNMENT, echoing tarot’s major arcana such as THE FOOL), hoping the tension would become the point. Instead:

• the ideas contradicted each other, the tone became muddy, and the conceptual foundation didn’t feel grounded. 🙁 I felt like I was stretching both systems too far away from what made them interesting in the first place.

I therefore tried I started testing moving image, using simple animation and stop-motion to see how IKEA-style characters would behave when trying to assemble intangible things.

I also played with tarot card formats, treating them like tiny instruction cards or symbolic diagrams to see whether a middle ground existed visually.

At this stage, the project still feels inconclusive to me. The tension between the tarot direction and the IKEA/self-help direction hasn’t resolved into a clear path, and the experiments—while useful—haven’t yet shaped themselves into a cohesive outcome. I can see that I’ll need to change or refine parts of the project in order to reach an outcome that feels intentional and conceptually grounded.