Page 164 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

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Design Meets Business
4.3. Methods
4.3.1. Research setting
Our research took place at the independent Dutch social innovation hub Waag. At Waag, around 50 creative workers are employed, with diverse backgrounds in art, science and technology. Creative workers at Waag organize projects for their client organizations in the areas of e-health and e-governance, and across a variety of domains related to digital society. Waag is a non-profit innovation hub that fuels its efforts through a combi- nation of funding from national and international public subsidies and grants (80 percent of their income), client organization co-financing and income from spin offs of their projects (20 percent of their income). Waag houses a FabLab, a FashionLab, and a BioLab, and hosts a Makers Guild. Its facilities are equipped with state-of-the-art digital technologies and creative tools. With over 20 years in existence, Waag is the largest inde- pendent creative center in Europe. One of their innovation projects, called ‘Fairphone’, has become an international example of open innovation in the digital society (www.fairphone.com).
Waag has its roots in the hacker movement of the 1990s, and as is stated on their website (www.waag.org) values the maker culture or a subculture whose aim is to help people to use technology and ‘change society in a positive way’. As the creative director said in an interview, ‘[Our clients] come to us when they need a change, a disruption’. Thus, the phenomenon of interest in this paper, how ceremony masters help others to experience liminality and moreover transition, is highly present and transparently observable (Pettigrew 1990).
Waag has clients in public and private sector industries: they work with research, private, and public organizations such as museums, ministries, and universities. Most of its projects are broadly defined, target far-ranging questions (e.g. How to digitalize the cultural heritage sector?) and exploring innovative solutions to broad societal questions (e.g. citizens science or open software). All Waag projects include either experimentation with or development of digital technologies. To understand what creative workers at Waag do, see also Table 4.1.
4.3.2. Data Collection
Our main data sources were interviews complemented by observations and documents (see Table 4.2 for an overview). We collected data in two phases. The first phase, from May to August 2014, was aimed at getting