Human life has always unfolded through material companions. Not as background, but as active presences. Things we lean on, work around, trip over, repair, ignore, and suddenly notice. This introduction frames the book as a prototype of objectography, where forty-five contributors reflect on domestic objects to reveal how homes shape selves, relations, and cultural values.

Rather than studying material culture in general, the essays highlight singular items that stand out through care, memory, or chance. The book’s emphasis on writing with objects rather than about them opens new avenues for thinking about domestic heritage as relational, multisensory, and emergent—an ongoing negotiation between people and the things that quietly sustain their worlds.

Drawing on thinkers from Perec to Miller and Appadurai, the text situates homes as both intimate sites and analytical grounds, where ordinary things orient subjectivity, anchor histories, and open futures. The essays here do not extract meaning from objects so much as stay with them, tracking how attention lingers, how affect builds, how a thing begins to matter without announcing itself.

This micro-scale, reflective approach reframes heritage as a situated, performative practice that unfolds through intimate relations with things. Blending ethnography with design sensibilities, the book invites readers to notice the infraordinary, reconsider their own domestic surroundings, and begin new objectographies.

Keywords: home-making, domestic objects, objectography, material culture, everyday life, ethnography, design