Making Knowledge: A Kit for Researching 3D Rhetorics

Ann Shivers-McNair, University of Arizona

(Published November 18, 2019) 

 

Introduction

This kit offers researchers a critical orientation to and strategies for researching what David Sheridan calls 3D, or fabricated, rhetorics in a way that accounts for knowledge-making as a distributed, collaborative, experiential, embodied, and technological process. Specifically, this kit includes:

• A theoretical and methodological orientation to accountability in researching 3D rhetorics
• A researcher toolkit for recording interactions and experiences (and when and why to use different tools, as well as examples of what the tools can produce)

Accountability in 3D Rhetorics Research 

Attention to rhetoric’s materiality is not new; indeed, scholars of feminist and decolonial rhetorics have long focused on the differential marking of bodies, objects, technologies, and places (e.g., Crowley, Cushman, Haas “Wampum,” Powell, and Sano-Franchini). At the same time, recent work in material and digital rhetorics troubles the boundaries between bodies, modes, media, technologies, and rhetorics (e.g., Hodgson and Barnett; Gries; McNely, Spinuzzi, and Teston; and Sheridan). These approaches share a commitment to attending to how rhetoric, rhetors, writing, and writers are made; troubling the boundaries between the discursive, the material, the human, and the nonhuman; and recognizing that such distinctions are drawn (and redrawn) rather than given. These commitments also call for research methods that account for bodies, modes, media, technologies, objects, and rhetorics in the making—including the researcher’s own role in the making of knowledge.

In this essay, I articulate 3D interviewing as an accountable methodology and method for 3D rhetorics research, building on the initial framework I laid out in a piece for Kairos PraxisWiki. I begin with definitions of 3D rhetorics and 3D interviewing situated in a theoretical-methodological framework for making knowledge; then, I explain how and why I developed the approach for a study of a Seattle makerspace. (Makerspaces are workshop spaces where people can go to learn and use traditional and emergent fabrication technologies, from 3D printers to sewing machines.) I conclude by introducing my researcher’s toolkit.

In situating my approach to 3D rhetorics, I draw most immediately upon David Sheridan’s argument that “rhetors can access greater rhetorical freedom and power if they avail themselves of the rhetorical potential of three-dimensional fabricated objects. Moreover, because of the particular way that 3D objects function in our daily lives, increased access to this form has important cultural and political implications” (250). Sheridan’s argument echoes the fast-growing international maker movement, which claims among its goals an aim to democratize innovation by making “makers” of people who might not otherwise have the training, access to technologies and tools, or inspiration (Hatch).

I consider 3D rhetorics closely related to the perhaps more widely-engaged area of digital rhetorics. Douglas Eyman distilled a definition of digital rhetorics as “the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances” (Digital 44). And while the word “digital” can index relatively new technologies, particularly software and code, Angela Haas reminds us that digital also means “our fingers, our digits, one of the primary ways . . . through which we make sense of the world and with which we write into the world. All writing is digital: digitalis in Latin means ‘of or relating to the fingers or toes’ or ‘a coding of information’” (Digirhet.org 242). Indeed, Haas also counters the dominant narrative of code as a Western invention by offering wampum belts as a rhetorical coding practice that far predates HTML (“Wampum”). And more recently, Eyman has advocated for more consideration of materiality and embodiment in digital rhetorics (“Looking Back”).

3D rhetorics, as the name suggests, focuses on fabricated objects—a category that includes, in my understanding, bodies-in-the-making (Haraway 195)—and fabrication technologies, while digital rhetorics often focus on digital interfaces and code. But 3D rhetorics necessarily includes the digital—both in the sense of fingers-as-digits and in the sense of the code and interfaces that connect humans to fabrication machines. Similarly, as Haas and Eyman point out, physicality is encoded into the definition of “digital.” Because I see 3D rhetorics and digital rhetorics as closely related, I also draw upon Justin Hodgson and Scott Barnett’s articulation of digital rhetoric: “As an art similarly rooted in contingent matters and states of affairs, rhetoric, in some respects, has always been a digital art, one deeply attuned to issues of delivery, invention, affect, and persuasion that are very much at the heart of our contemporary digital technologies and practices.” This definition reminds us that despite the newness that may be associated with the terms “3D” and “digital,” materiality and mediation in rhetoric are hardly new.

Indeed, just as materiality and mediation have long been part of rhetorical traditions (in and beyond Western notions of rhetoric), theoretical and methodological orientations to examining and accounting for materiality and mediation have long been central to feminist and indigenous approaches to rhetoric. For example, relations are central to Angela Haas’s articulation of a Native American rhetorical tradition (“Wampum”). Similarly, Gabriela Raquel Ríos highlights the importance of relations with spaces and places from an indigenous perspective, arguing that space itself is entangled differently with different bodies and not all spaces are spaces of inherent possibility (82). As Haas argues, “technology is not just what does the work; it is the work—and that work relies on an ongoing relationship between bodies and things” (“Race” 291). Expanding the purview of rhetoric beyond humans and their words to include the nonverbal and the nonhuman demands an orientation that can account for the differential markings of “human,” “nonhuman,” “verbal,” “nonverbal,” and “rhetoric.” Attending to boundary marks means accounting for the ways that the continual making, un-making, and re-making of boundaries also means a continual making, un-making, and re-making of relations among bodies, places, and things.

Scholars of new materialist rhetorics, such as Laurie Gries, are similarly acknowledging the centrality of relations in accounting for rhetorical work. Still, as I draw on recent conversations in 3D rhetorics, digital rhetorics, and new materialist rhetorics that are arriving at an onto-epistemology similar to onto-epistemologies long held by feminist and indigenous rhetoricians (albeit through a postmodern, rather than a not-necessarily-Western epistemology), it is important for me to account for the boundary marking that happens at the level of theory building. As Sara Ahmed has argued in her critique of new materialism, when we mark something as “new,” we risk eliding the work that has come before it (26). Thus, I want to take care to note that my theoretical-methodological framework threads together some approaches that are grounded in Western epistemologies and some that are not, some approaches that present themselves as relatively new or contemporary and some that challenge those claims of newness.

It is within this multifaceted theoretical-methodological conversation about accountability to boundaries and relations that I situate 3D interviewing, a method/ology I adapted and developed from qualitative research traditions. Indeed, as I have argued, 3D interviewing is as much a methodology, by which I mean an orientation to knowledge-making, as it is a method, by which I mean a way of knowledge-making or gathering data. 3D interviewing is attending to the dimensionality of meaning-making in its many forms—words, gestures, bodies, objects, relationships—in time and space. It means taking what people do as seriously as what people say and reading those things through each other. And it means accounting for the dimensionality of my own participation in the interactions and knowledge-making. 3D interviewing is a digital method in that I often use digital cameras to record video and photographs to help further dimensionalize the interactions, and it's also a digital method in the sense described by Angela Haas (Digirhet.org) in that I am always using my digits, my fingers, to record: in handwriting, in typed notes, with cameras, through touch and gesture, and through other embodied experiences.

In a makerspace I often can neither set up a camera on a tripod nor reasonably require a maker on the move to sit down and hook up to a lavalier microphone. Such actions would be inconveniences at best and safety risks at worst in a space full of fabrication machines. Therefore, to account for acts of making as they unfold, I move with them. Any digital cameras are usually either in my hands or on my body, the latter being helpful when I need my hands for taking notes or participating in the making. To keep up with the action, I might have my iPhone in my back pocket, a notebook in my hands, and a GoPro video camera on a head strap. When filming was not appropriate—and it often isn't in a space where people are working on proprietary projects and inventions and when there are people who haven't agreed to be in the study in the space—I might just have the notebook and the iPhone for snapping quick pictures. (Many different digital and cyborg research apparatus configurations are described in the toolkit.) The idea is that in order to keep up with and account for the human-machine cyborg interactions, I myself had to become a moving cyborg of analog and digital recording equipment, including, of course, my embodied sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences and memories.

3D Rhetorics Research Toolkit

Because this toolkit operates at the level of methodology and method, the tools and strategies I describe here are not as immediately reproducible as, say, a file for 3D printing—though even that involves localizing the printer settings to accommodate your environment, materials, and machine idiosyncrasies. But as I was developing and localizing 3D interviewing for 3D rhetorics research, I found it helpful to hear accounts of what other researchers did and how they did it. Thus, I offer here a set of tools with explanations of when, why, and how I used them, as well as examples.

My use of “tools” is expansive here, particularly since the first three “tools” listed—body, time, and community—are not the sort of thing you might pack in your bag of research equipment. But I name them and begin with them in order to highlight that body, time, and community are in many ways our primary instruments for knowledge-making, and the relations that proceed from attending to body, time, and community can and should shape the way we use other research tools, be it a notebook or a video camera.

To emphasize that this toolkit is a snapshot of a dynamic localization process, I focus the examples I offer on a particular research moment (in fact, a particular day): the Seattle Mini Maker Faire on September 16, 2017, and the Arm Open Mic Night, a smaller event that immediately followed the Mini Maker Faire and involved many of the makers with whom I worked. More details about these events will emerge in the examples below, but I want to briefly contextualize the events in relation to my larger project.

My study of a Seattle maker community began in early 2015, and because I brought little prior knowledge or experience with fabrication technologies to the study, I spent many months learning how to understand and interact with both the people and the machines in a makerspace. Through the generosity of the makers with whom I worked (and my own determination to learn and connect), I not only learned fabrication technologies and processes used by makers, but also built relationships with the makers. In this way, I became an increasingly active participant in the community. By September 2017 I had come to consider many of the makers my friends, co-authored an article with one of them (Shivers-McNair and San Diego), worked on another project with several of the makers, and was comfortable with at least the fundamentals of the technologies they use, if not the details and nuances.

I also want to note the changes in my own status over the course of the project. I began the project as a graduate student at the University of Washington. I lived in Seattle, which is also where the makers in the study live and work. And while I had the luxury of (relatively) more time and proximity to my participants, I also had limited resources for digital research tools like camera equipment. In the summer of 2017, I moved to Tucson to start work as an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and I traded time and proximity for resources (in the form of startup funding) for traveling back to Seattle and acquiring more digital research tools. To account for these changes, I have noted tools that were purchased with student loan money as a graduate student and tools that were purchased with startup funds as an assistant professor. I share these particularities in the hopes of further emphasizing the ways in which these tools are localized—and, I hope, localizable—for specific cultural-material contexts.

Body

When, Why, and How to Use It

As Anne Frances Wysocki notes, “our bodies—our primary media . . . —are not fixed; they are mutable. We come to be always already embedded—embodied—in mediation” (4). No matter how many cameras are attached to me, my sensing, feeling, relating, moving, and remembering body is always my primary research apparatus. I advocate for using our bodies with awareness of what Natasha Jones, Kristen Moore, and Rebecca Walton call the 3Ps—positionality, privilege, and power—especially if your body, like mine, is white, cisgender, and abled. We should use our bodies with empathy and care for the bodies our work affects, and we should also use our bodies with care. After all, as Jimmie Killingsworth observes, thinking of our (cyborg) bodies as tools can encourage us not only to use but also to “overuse or even abuse the body” (83). And as much as I hate being in front of a camera, accidental selfies like Figure 1, which is a screenshot from a 360 still image I did not realize I took while setting up my 360 camera on a tripod at the Seattle Mini Maker Faire, remind me to account for my body—and the privilege it affords me as a white, cisgender, non-disabled woman—as a research apparatus and as a body in relation to other bodies.

What It Can Produce

Early in my fieldwork, I learned that I could not write very well about machines or processes that I did not experientially understand. Fortunately, the makers I worked with were generous and patient with me, giving me opportunities to learn-by-doing, which is a very different process than learning-by-watching or learning-by-listening. My body and my internalized memories became the primary apparatus for recording these experiences, which I then re-externalized in words, as well as in the understandings that informed how I photographed or video-recorded future activities. Furthermore, acknowledging and attending to the needs of my body—needing to eat, needing to sit down sometimes—created spaces for conversations (over food) or for quiet time to gather my thoughts, and these moments were just as essential as observing “official” activities. At the Seattle Mini Maker Faire, this meant granting myself an hour in the middle of a long day to slip away to a nearby café, eat and hydrate, take ibuprofen for a headache, rest my back and feet (I was carrying around a backpack full of equipment), catch up on my typed notes, and think through goals and questions for the rest of the day.

Time

When, Why, and How to Use It

As researchers, we can no more escape time than we can escape being a body. Indeed, time is part of, and essential to, being a body and being a community. But I name time separately as a tool here to emphasize the importance of the time it takes to build relationships, to understand what it is we are doing and seeing, and to tell stories. Cameras, images, and video are no replacement for time. And just as we can account for our bodies-as-apparatuses, we can also account for time. This screenshot (from the Hours app I use on my phone to track my time in the field) marks the first day of my fieldwork, February 28, 2015, when I showed up for an open tour at a Seattle makerspace and timidly asked if I might conduct an ethnographic case study there. My tracking app tells a linear story of my time in the field, and I embrace linearity as part of storytelling. I also acknowledge that linearity is not an absolute but rather is itself made and remade in and by the stories we tell. In other words, the causality and linearity that end up in the accounts I make are not inherent or absolute; they are made and remade in each experience I have, including the experience of describing experiences. My understanding of and experiences at the Seattle Mini Maker Faire and the Arm Open-Mic Night in September 2017 both inform and are informed by my experience of walking into a makerspace for the first time in February 2015.

What It Can Produce

As I discuss in the community section below, relationships are an important products of time, as are the embodied understandings and experiences I describe in the body section above. Time has also been an important tool for building my own researcher ethos. In an ethnographic case study that focuses on a small group of people in a particular place, the longitudinal dimension of the study (and the kinds of visualizations and storytelling it affords) helps me articulate the usefulness and nature of my knowledge-making, both to academic audiences and to the maker community I work with.

Community

When, Why, and How to Use It

In my work, community is central to accountability. I acknowledge that it is not always possible, or even appropriate, to be part of the communities we research, but whether or not we see ourselves as part of the communities we study, our research involves communities, and we can acknowledge, account for, and be careful in our relationships with those communities. I first met Clarissa San Diego (pictured in the screenshot from my Instagram post at the conclusion of the Arm Open-Mic Night), leader and founder at Makerologist, briefly in 2015, and then, I interviewed her via Skype in January 2016. The interview began with me thinking of Clarissa as an interviewee, but by the end of the interview, we were collaborators, and we ended up becoming coauthors and friends. Working with Clarissa changed the nature and stakes of my research, moving me from writing about to writing with the maker community. Clarissa and her maker colleagues have welcomed and guided my contributions to their professional communities, just as they also contribute to my academic communities.

The communities in my research—in this case not only the maker community I study but also my academic peers, students, and other stakeholders—ultimately determine how I use all the other tools in my toolkit. Where should my body be in this space? Should I video-record this interaction? How do I describe what I just saw? What is OK to share? How do I edit this image? What does accessibility look like for this video? What makes a good story? What’s the takeaway? All these questions lead me back to the communities involved in my research, whether it is co-constructing with a research participant an understanding of an interaction, consulting best practices for communicating research in my field, or responding to peer feedback. And because community—specifically the relationships that comprise community—is so central to the research apparatus, it has to be accounted for accordingly.

What It Can Produce

Since relationships and relationality are the core of accountability in my research, more so than traditional Western conceptions of objectivity and validity, I see my relationships with the people I study and work with as strengthening my accountability, rather than compromising my objectivity, and I account for those relationships as part of the research apparatus. The specific configurations of my relationships are not necessarily exportable or reproducible in the way that camera settings or techniques are, but as Rose et al. argue, we can cultivate mutually beneficial relationships and account for relationships as part of the research apparatus across research contexts (221).

Questions

When, Why, and How to Use It

My approach to 3D interviewing does not make use of a traditional interview protocol, in the sense of a pre-planned set of questions asked by the researcher, but this does not mean that questions are not part of my apparatus. Questions are, in fact, very important. My approach to 3D interviewing involves two shifts in my thinking about questions. First, I, as the researcher, am not the sole questioner; rather, the questions that participants ask each other and me are just as important as the questions I ask. For example, in the interaction that was happening when I took the photograph above (Figure 4), Richard Albritton, of Makerologist, was demonstrating an LED-enhanced fidget spinner, and his interlocutor asked more—and better—questions than I did. Second, questions (and their answers) are not the primary means of knowledge-making in my study; rather, questions are one part of a complex, distributed research apparatus (just as they are one section in this kit of interrelated tools).

When I ask questions, they tend to include the following:

• What is that? [referring to anything, but often an object, tool, or term]
• What are you working on?
• What inspired you to make [object, design, connection, etc.]?
• How does it work?
• How did you do/make that?
• How did you learn how to use [machine, tool, software, system, etc.]?
• What is your relationship to [person, community, space, machine, object, etc.]?
• What drew you to [space, event, community, etc.]?
• Have you had previous experiences working with tools like this or making things?
• [In the case of discussing past actions or interactions] Does my understanding of [action, event, interaction, etc.] align with yours?
• [In the case of an object being fabricated] What will [the object] do, and who will use it?
• [In the case of troubleshooting] Have you encountered this issue before? How did you know to do that?
• [In the case of photos and video] Is it OK if I take pictures or video? Can I share them in my work? Are there shots you want me to get? What’s the best way to share them with you?

What It Can Produce

While my argument for 3D interviewing insists on taking what people do as seriously as what people say, questions are certainly an important way of creating, mediating, and correcting understandings, particularly when those understandings involve relative abstractions. For example, during dinner at the Arm Open-Mic Night, Richard and I were discussing the lifespans of various Seattle makerspaces, and he noted that “there comes a point with makerspaces where it’s either going to work or it won’t.” I asked, “Is that particular to the maker movement? Or is it just humans trying to work together?” Richard replied, “It’s humans trying to work together, but in the maker movement there’s no roadmap, so it’s harder.” Richard’s insightful response both clarified and added to the credibility of my own understanding of the maker community.

Note-taking Devices

When, Why, and How to Use It

My body (learning, remembering, doing) records experiences in my recollections, and it records understandings and in the muscle memory I develop for operating a machine or moving around a space. Similarly, my participation in a community records and distributes memories through shared experiences and collaborative knowledge-making. But taking notes, in words and hand-drawn sketches, is also crucially important to my research: particularly as my notes are both part of the experience and an interpretation of the experience. Following Angela Haas, I acknowledge that whether I am typing on a tablet or writing with a pencil in a notebook, my writing is digital (Digirhet.org). I am both experiencing and (en)coding experience. I have found that note-taking can be more practical and appropriate than photographing, audio recording, or video recording, particularly when people are working on a proprietary design, discussing a sensitive matter, or interacting with a client. I also noticed, in retrospect, that I relied almost entirely on note-taking in the early stages of my fieldwork, as I was building relationships and trust (and also trying to figure out how to understand and move around the spaces I was in), whereas at the Seattle Mini Maker Faire and the Arm Open-Mic event, I relied more on photography, videography, and embodied interactions; though, as I note in the body section, I also took a midday break that included typing notes (on my iPad) from my interactions. I took another break during down time at the end of the day to add more notes.

For me, the question of whether to use a notebook or a tablet (or laptop) is a practical one. As much as I would have liked all my notes to be taken in typed form (and instantly synced across devices and backed up in the cloud), I have found myself on my feet moving around with people for most of my fieldwork, and while I can sometimes quickly type notes on my phone, it’s usually easier for me to handwrite notes and sketches into a notebook (particularly one with a hardcover that supports writing-while-standing). But when I get a chance to sit down (or, as I learned over the course of my fieldwork, I make a chance to sit down), I typically type notes on a tablet or laptop. I am not using a coding methodology that would make it advantageous to transfer all handwritten notes to typed format for computer-aided analysis, but I do scan all my handwritten notes to pdf and back them up along with all my other digital materials.

What It Can Produce

Many of my handwritten and typed notes end up (either verbatim or indirectly) in presentations and publications about my work, including this one. Indeed, I see the boundary between “note-taking” and “drafting” as productively blurry—just as I see the boundaries between “data collection,” “data analysis,” and “data presentation” as equally and productively blurry. And as I argued in the community section, I do not see this boundary blurring as compromising my objectivity; rather, I see it as yet another important facet of a complex research apparatus that I can acknowledge and account for when I share my work.

Voice Recorder

When, Why, and How to Use It

I have had this trusty (and cheap) Sony voice recorder since my journalist days, and I have used it to record many research interviews in my academic career. Doing research in a makerspace, surrounded by loud machines and multiple conversations, has presented me with formidable sound-recording challenges that I have only begun to try to tackle, and my voice recorder is often ineffective as a primary recording device. Even as I am considering purchasing more advanced sound-recording equipment, I have to reckon with the environment itself. In practice thus far, I have tended to rely on the on-board microphones in my video cameras (even as I know this sentence will make film-makers cringe) because the difficulty of hearing human voices over machine sounds and other human voices in the videos I record is in fact similar to my embodied experience. Closed captions and transcripts mitigate that difficulty and help make the videos more intelligible for viewers, regardless of their hearing abilities.

What It Can Produce

In my maker study, I find myself using the voice recorder to record member checks and collaborative knowledge-making as a form of accountability. Clarissa and I recorded our conversation as we worked on our Technical Communication article, and in a classroom study of a maker-inspired pedagogy, I recorded collaborative analysis sessions with student coauthors and shared the file with them both as a resource to consult and as an accountability measure as we wrote our manuscript.

Smartphone

When, Why, and How to Use It

I considered including this image of my iPhone (Figure 6) in the “Body” section of this toolkit because my phone is almost always on or near my body. When I am doing fieldwork, I keep my phone in my back pocket so I can easily pull it out when I need it. While the video or photo quality does not necessarily match that of a DSLR or a GoPro shooting 4K, the convenience and relative unobtrusiveness of the phone camera make the trade-off worthwhile in many situations. Snapping quick photos or videos is typically my primary use case for a smartphone-as-research-tool. For example, when I was observing a maker operate a machine and a small fire started on the machine cutting bed, I was able to quickly snap a photo of the fire with my phone. I would have missed the opportunity if I tried to set up the shot on my DSLR (which I didn’t have near me at the moment). In other words, the phone camera works well for situations when I do not have another camera set up. And as I describe below in the 360 video camera section, my phone is also the interface for my 360 camera. I also use my phone to do quick internet searches for unfamiliar terms or references, to jot down notes in my cloud-synced notes app (see the note-taking devices section), to record my time in the field (see the time section), to track (roughly) the steps I take and distances I cover during fieldwork, to post to social media while I am doing fieldwork (see the community section), and to communicate and coordinate with people in my study (see communication platforms section).

What It Can Produce

I have hundreds of phone images saved that help me remember changes over time in the layout of spaces, changes in who is or is not in those spaces, and changes in machine configurations. I also find the wide-angle lens useful when I do not have time to switch the lens on my DSLR (with which I often use a 35mm lens, which is not a wide angle but is best for close-up portraits).

DSLR Camera (and Gear)

When, Why, and How to Use It

For most of my fieldwork, I had a Nikon D3200 (a hand-me-down from my partner, who is a professional photographer) that I rarely used in the field, particularly in the early stages when my recording techniques were focused more on my own understanding and points of reference. But as I began sharing my research in presentations and in publications, I realized I needed higher quality images to help invite audiences into a space that may be unfamiliar to them. I purchased this Nikon D7500 with startup funds in preparation for the Seattle Mini Maker Faire and the Arm Open-Mic event, particularly because I wanted to be able to contribute useful photos for the official event recap.

In addition to the D7500 body, I use (most often) a 35mm portrait lens (as I noted above in the smartphone section). I make frequent use of the camera strap that came with the body, using it to carry the camera and keep my hands free as needed (as illustrated in the image in the body section). I also occasionally use a small, bendable tripod (the blue, three-legged base attached to the bottom of the selfie stick in the image in the 360 video camera section) to position the camera on a table to record video.

What It Can Produce

I do not profess to be an expert photographer, and my vision issues make it difficult for me to use the camera on anything other than automatic settings, but fortunately, the automatic settings on this DSLR compensate for many, if not all, of my limitations. As my research approach has evolved from more traditional observation methods to more collaborative and participatory methods, I think more about the images I collect not only in terms of how they help me but also, and equally importantly, in terms of how they might be of use to others. Those relationships shaped my decision to rely primarily on the DSLR at the Seattle Mini Maker Faire and the Arm Community event. in discussions leading up to the events, I offered to share my photos (via Google Drive) with the maker community for them to use in promoting their own work. The event recapper included my photos from the Arm Open-Mic event in a blog post (St. John), and the organizers made the Drive folder available to all event participants for them to share on social media with the event hashtag.

GoPro Video Camera (and Gear)

When, Why, and How to Use It

I purchased this GoPro Hero4 Silver video camera with student loan funding as a graduate student nearly a year into my fieldwork. I was beginning to think more about sharing what I was learning with others, and I wanted a powerful and portable video camera to record interactions and activities in a space where setting up a tripod could be impractical at best and dangerous at worst. Initially, as I describe in my Kairos PraxisWiki piece, I wore the camera on a head-mount strap that positioned the camera on my forehead, leaving my hands free for taking notes and interacting with people and machines. While this yielded interesting (if also jarring) video data that very much emphasized my cyborg embodiment and movements, it was also physically and socially awkward to wear the camera on my head. As time passed, I found myself moving more toward holding it in my hands (typically at chest level, so I could use my body to steady my arms). Finally, I bought a steadicam, which came with a learning curve. in addition to the challenge of balancing the steadicam, I am also learning how to walk in a way that does not shake the camera—a steadicam can only do so much, after all. I am considering a gimbal (the electronic equivalent of a steadicam) once I devise a better sound-recording setup, since the motor sounds of a gimbal can be picked up by the on-board camera microphone.

The when of shooting video is particularly important when people who have not agreed to be part of the study could end up in a shot. For example, the GoPro videos in the Kairos PraxisWiki piece only include people who agreed to be in the study. At the Seattle Mini Maker Faire, all attendees were greeted at the event entrance with a sign notifying us that by entering the space, we were consenting not only to be photographed and video-recorded but also for our likeness to be used. Indeed, I was one of many people taking pictures and video at the event, and when attendees posted their photos and videos to Twitter with the event hashtag, their posts were displayed on a giant screen in the event space. Still, I proceeded with caution, as I describe below.

What It Can Produce

Fig. 2. “Seattle Mini Maker Faire”

This nineteen-second clip (edited from a five-minute continuous shot) from the Seattle Mini Maker Faire shows the Makerologist team’s interactive display inspired by Netflix’s Stranger Things. The brief pass shows Clarissa (wearing a white lab coat) maneuvering a tripod before the camera pans to show a man and a woman, who is holding a small child on her hip, interacting with the display as Makerologist Krunal Desai (also wearing a white lab coat) looks on. The woman types on an iPad, and lights corresponding to letters illuminate to spell out what she types. (In this shot, “I” and “D” illuminate.) I chose this clip because the non-Makerologist attendees’ faces are never directly visible in the shot, but the sense of the interaction and the ambient sounds of people talking and moving around are still there, providing, I hope, a way for audiences to experience an event that might otherwise be unfamiliar.

Communication Platforms

When, Why, and How to Use It

In my project, communication platforms have been essential to my efforts to account for dimensionality (in the broadest sense of the word)—particularly interactions that are not necessarily physically co-present but are no less dimensional in nature. I have used many different communication platforms to interact with the makers in this study: phone calls, texts, emails, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Trello, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Skype, Appear, and Slack. As is the case with all the tools in this kit, my use of communication platforms is determined by the community. Specifically, I use tools that I am invited or given permission to use. I highlight Slack here, specifically, because its forum-like interface (with channels for various topics and projects and its options to send individual messages) has been especially helpful in communicating and coordinating with the makers when I am not physically co-present. This has become especially important now that I no longer live in Seattle. I have also taken to using Slack to facilitate member checks of draft material (including this article).

What It Can Produce

I am on the Makerologist Slack team and on the SoDo Makerspace Slack team, and I am thus able to keep up with goings-on and coordinate with members when I am planning a visit (as illustrated in the screenshot from the Makerologist Slack before my trip to the Seattle Mini Maker Faire). We are also using Slack to coordinate our work on a piece co-authored by several Makerologist team members: the project has its own channel (#parlorpress) for announcements and communication, and we have embedded a Google doc in the channel for easy access to our collaborative composing space. Indeed, as much as I want to embrace and emphasize more than just words in my 3D rhetorics research, I also acknowledge the vital importance of words in coordinating, creating, and mediating dimensional spaces for rhetorical interactions.

Possibilities for Localizing 3D Interviewing and this Toolkit

I want to emphasize that this toolkit is both localized and localizable. My use of “localization” draws on its use in technical communication and user experience. As Laura Gonzales and Rebecca Zantjler explain, “user-localization focuses on the specific activities and strategies users employ when communicating to meet their culturally-situated needs. Understanding user-localization, in turn, can help developers design and adapt technologies to meet the needs of users in localized contexts” (272). When I refer to localizing methods, then, I mean deploying, adapting, and inventing strategies that are responsive to a particular cultural-material context. My 3D research method/ology is rooted not only in theoretical-methodological conversations about boundaries and relations but also in the cultural and material realities of my relationship to a makerspace and maker communities.

This is not to suggest that 3D interviewing is only relevant for my project; 3D interviewing is not just about interviewing, observing, and interacting with someone while they operate a 3D printer. I take the central commitment to accounting for dimensionality with me into any interviewing situation now, whether it involves a 3D printer or a conversation over Skype. But I do want to emphasize that 3D interviewing can be re-localized for different research contexts. As I conclude in my Kairos PraxisWiki piece, I can envision ways to apply core principles of 3D interviewing (accounting for dimensionality and the marking of boundaries in relations while attending to 3D rhetorics as they unfold) to a variety of research contexts beyond makerspaces and the maker movement. I think this method/ology is particularly useful as a way to account for both the making of knowledge and the role of the researcher as part of the research apparatus. 

It is also important to understand that this kit is a static snapshot of a dynamic localization process. I did not begin my research study with this kit—nor could I possibly have. I began with my prior research experiences and training, a theoretical and methodological attunement to boundaries and relations, and specific digital methods described and enacted by other qualitative researchers. This kit is nearly three years in the making, and it will surely continue to evolve as my relationship to the community and my access to technologies evolve.

If your aim is to adapt this kit for your own research projects, I hope you will embrace the localization process and seek out ways to make the strategies and tools I describe here responsive to your own cultural-material contexts. To that end, I’ve created a worksheet for articulating the relationships among your research questions, tools, and communities. I also hope you will develop and share, in turn, new ways for making accountable knowledge and engaging with 3D rhetorics.