Page 166 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

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familiar with the organization, the practices of the creative workers and the types of projects they were doing. The second phase of data collection, which focused on our current research question, ran from May 2015 to February 2016.
In total we conducted 58 semi-structured interviews (between 50 and 120 minutes) with a diverse selection of Waag’s creative workers and clients. We voice-recorded and transcribed all the interviews verbatim. In the first phase, 31 interviews were conducted – with support of research assistants - with Waag’s creative workers selected on the basis of snowball sampling (Patton 2002). The interview guides (see Appendix) included broad questions concerning members’ perceptions about their work, the design of the organization, their relationship to other organi- zations and other topics that helped us to flesh out the details concerning creative work.
In the second phase, and after the first round of analysis, 27 additional interviews were conducted around three projects of Waag. These three projects were purposefully selected based on three criteria (Patton 2002). First, we looked for ‘typical’ examples of their work and fitted our research question, namely projects that were clearly aimed to create change. Second, the role that Waag played in the projects had to be substantial, and directed at a broad variety of participants, so we could study their practices. Finally, as we were interested in facilitating liminality, we had to (partially) follow projects in real time. Based on these motivations, we followed the projects named Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab (ASCL), E-ID, and Material EncounterS with digital Cultural Heritage (MESCH). In this paper, we use ASCL to develop an empirical narrative of how liminality is facilitated by Waag. We chose ASCL as the project is exemplary of the work of Waag and we gathered most real-time data on this project as we participated in three of the project’s workshops. Further, similar to the other projects we followed, in ASCL we found generic patterns of activating and morphing (see Table 4.4). For more information about the client, content and dura- tion of the projects, see Table 4.1.
Within these project contexts, we analyzed activities, workshops, meetings, and other events that clarified what Waag’s creative workers do. In the second round of our data collection, the first author - at times accom- panied by one of the other authors - carried out 18 interviews with creative workers and 9 with their clients. In semi-structured interviews, we asked the creative workers to describe one of the three selected projects in which they were involved. We for example asked them to draw a timeline, which helped the creative workers to recall project details from beginning to end and helped us articulate in greater detail the ways the projects unfolded.