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While I had, by autumn 2015, identified and gained access to three main field sites, I thought it would be beneficial to deepen my ethnographic work and evolving findings with a broader understanding of, and comparison with, the daily life and workings of other community-based workshops in operation in Scotland.

Concurrent with the ‘observant participation’ described above, therefore, I

attended the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire, which took place at Summerhall, and for which the Hacklab held an open day, affording me a further opportunity to observe and discuss the role of makerspaces with members and visitors. In late

2015 I visited The Forge, a new mobile ‘maker space’ housed in a series of shipping

containers and located on disused land in Edinburgh’s West End. At The Forge, I spoke with one of its founders, received a tour of the site, and visited the glass workshop of one of the resident craftspeople.

While exploring possible field sites, I had previously made contact with, and interviewed, a member of the Skill Share Dundee board of trustees. However, in

November 2016, I re-visited Skill Share Dundee in their space on the western outskirts of Dundee, taking part in a community open day and receiving a tour of their facilities from their founder, Peter. In the same month I arranged a visit to the GalGael trust, a community and heritage association in Govan, Glasgow, centred around a woodwork and boat-building workshop not dissimilar in approach to that of Grassmarket Furniture, with the aim of creating “a cultural

anchor point around which local people are re-kindling skills, community and a

sense of purpose”37_{. GalGael will be a tangential topic of discussion in Chapters 5}

and 6. Two site visits were also arranged at this time to MAKLab Glasgow, an

organisation operating under the slogan “Empowerment Through Making” and which provides resources and equipment “for people from all backgrounds, of all

ages and all abilities to use making as a tool for social empowerment, regeneration, inclusion, economic growth and social capital”38_{. I received a}

detailed tour of MAKLab from their Studio Mentor, and on my second visit I undertook a soldering workshop, to gain more involved experience with a skill which would be commonplace at the Hacklab.

Finally, towards the end of the second phase of data collection, a visit was made to Dundee Makerspace, a workshop which one of my Hacklab participants had previously been involved with, and to which he had donated equipment. I wanted to trace what had happened to these tools, while comparing the space with that of the Hacklab. On the site visit, I received a tour of their large space, and discussed

the dynamics of Dundee’s maker community. I also interviewed the founder of the

Edinburgh Tool Library, a charity which, at the time of the research was planning to open its own community workshop (which opened after the study was complete). Such diverse site visits were extremely helpful in informing my field work, highlighting juxtapositions between various spaces and organisational

37_{www.galgael.org [Accessed 18/07/17]} 38_{www.maklab.co.uk [Accessed 18/07/17]}

approaches, while bringing to the foreground possible points of interest for analysis.

While the foregoing discussion outlines the sites for what could be described as

classical ethnographic ‘observation’, contemporary ethnographies often also supplement observations and field diaries with in-depth participant interviews. Some reservations about interviewing as a method were expressed above, in Section 3.3. I would briefly like to address these here and outline why I felt interviews (and textual netnography) to be a valuable supplementary data source, not least in their ability to provide a deeper understanding, and further interrogation, of issues arising during observant participation.

Due to recent trends towards an appreciation of the more-than-representational in human geography, Hitchings (2012) admits to some unease regarding his use of

‘conventional’ interviewing in studies dealing with everyday practices. He notes

that the discomfort is such that, when presenting at conferences he has tended to downplay this aspect of his studies in place of broader statements of

‘ethnographic’ methods. Surveying his past research projects, however, he concludes that “like the tennis player, respondents may be preoccupied at the time, but still able to discuss how things went afterwards” (Ibid: 63; Browne, 2016). That is, the idea that the interview transcript or recording, the photograph or the digital archive, are exhausted by representational concerns is to grant the latter too much power.

Geography has indeed seen an increase in the use of methods such as the ‘walk-

along’ interview (Paterson, 2009), with many of the informal conversations contributing to my research resembling something akin to a ‘make-along’

interview. This openness to the unconventional use of more ‘traditional’

qualitative methods is discussed by Dowling et al. (2016: 2), who argue that human geographers are:

harnessing a range of conventional qualitative techniques to the task of recognizing and engaging with more-than-

human geographies. They are employing incredibly sensitive and nuanced analyses to data collected from interviews, focus groups, field diaries, ethnographies, secondary documents and archival material. (See also Jackson and Mazzei, 2011; Kuntz and Presnall, 2012; Crang, 2003)

In my case, informal discussions were recorded only in field notes, with ‘formal’,

recorded semi-structured interviews undertaken in a rather conventional manner, often during lunch breaks at the Grassmarket or in the Hacklab during the day, when the workshops were less busy. Convenience and snowball sampling were used to this end, with the emergent nature of an ethnographic research project

resulting in what has been more broadly termed ‘organic sampling’ (Robinson, 2014), namely, a sample size monitored and altered continuously on both theoretical and practical grounds (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). There can, of course, be no set number of interviewees, especially in a study such as this, in which interviews are a supplementary data source, rather than the only one. As Robinson (2014: 31) notes:

Being responsive to the practical realities of research is a key skill for the qualitative researcher, as collecting in- depth data leads to challenges that are never entirely predictable at the outset of a project.

Guidelines and expectations for classic interview-based qualitative studies vary from as few as three interviewees in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Robinson, 2014) to a supposed average of 20-30 (Boddy, 2016), though an N of 1 can be justifiable (Baxter and Eyles, 1997). If a sample size is too large it can practically inhibit the close reading of data to which qualitative research particularly lends itself, with Boddy (2016) placing this limit at around 30 interviewees. Such discussions are largely redundant, however, given that emergent sampling needs to be adapted to fit the specific research questions

asked, and the quality of data obtained (Mason, 2010).39 _{The resulting sample of} in-depth interviews (N=22) for this research, however, ended up heavily skewed by gender (16 Male, 6 Female). While a limitation, this is also reflective of the fact that the majority of members at the Grassmarket and Edinburgh Hacklab, at the time of research, were male.

My questions during semi-structured interviews took a similar format across all

three spaces, opening with relatively easy ‘ice breaker’ questions around how long a participant had been involved in a space, and how that involvement came about. This was followed by an attempt to get a sense of biographical trajectory, tracing

the person’s involvement in maker activities, usually excavating this story backwards, in reverse-chronological order. Once a rapport was built, the remainder of the interview would turn back to present involvement in the workshops, the significance this has (or hasn’t) had in their lives, and allow me to

present them with observations regarding the daily life of the workshops to comment on.

Where possible, interviews took place in the workshops, but a minority took place outside the workshop, and, for practical reasons, one (Jacob) over Skype. Interviewees are detailed in the following table:

Name Gender / Age Hacklab Grassmarket Remakery

Brian M, 35-45

Dennis M, 45-55

Daniel M, 18-25

Elaine F, 45-55

39 _{Of course, coupled with the elements of autoethnography in a study of this nature, I count} myself as a further participant in this research.

Liam M, 18-25 Tony M, 35-45 Todd M, 18-25 Susan F, 25-35 Tommy M, 45-55 Ben M, 25-35 Edward M, 25-35 Harry M, 35-45 Kevin M, 25-35 Stewart M, 45-55 Jacob M, 25-35 William M, 25-35 Amber F, 25-35 Federica F, 25-35 David M, 55-65 Chris M, 25-35 Sarah F, 35-45 Molly F, 18-25 Skillshare Dundee