Understanding the home workshop: project space, project time, and material interaction

This article is developed from a qualitative study of amateur makers who built and used home workshops as part of their leisure activities. The research aimed to develop an account of the individual’s experience of making, and the ways in which they used accumulations of tools and materials in conjunction with special kinds of spaces in order to make their activities possible. The article argues that not only do amateur makers enter a special kind of ‘project space’ when they go into their workshops, they also portion off a special kind of ‘project time’, a temporal space within which their activities can take place. Turning to ideas about situated cognition, the article argues that these workspaces create external ‘scaffolding’ which is an essential component of the makers’ continuous problem solving process. The article concludes that working in workshops with tools and materials, amateur makers are able to derive aesthetic satisfaction by being intertwined in simultaneous interactions between themselves and their environment.