Page 55 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 43
A second round of 27 interviews were conducted by me from May 2015 to November 2015. In total, I did 18 interviews with Waag’s members and 9 with clients or partners. Interviews with clients and partners helped to understand ‘taken for granted’ behaviors that easily go unnoticed by Waag’s members. The majority of these interviews were focused on the specific work of Waag during three selected projects. I asked different people working in different projects to describe how the project developed from the beginning to the end (or the current moment), while zooming in on ‘critical incidents’ such as moments of disparity, conflict, change and so on. I found that this strategy was helpful in getting more detailed stories about their work. Also, during several interviews with Waag’s members, I asked the informants to draw a timeline of the project in which they were involved. This strategy of visual mapping helped informants to recollect details and me to develop more sensitivity about the unfolding of the projects.
Observing in projects. I supplemented my interview data with obser- vations. I shadowed the practices of organizational members on various occasions, varying from co-creation workshops to organizational meetings and presentations. In total around 960 minutes (16 hours) of observations was conducted. In the first round of data collection between May 2014 and August 2014, observations were done by ‘strategically hanging around’ (Watson 2011) during events. During the second round of data collection, observations were conducted in the selected projects. These observations often took a more participatory character as I joined various workshops. During these observations the first author jotted down notes about the general atmosphere, interesting situations and illuminating quotes. As soon as possible, these notes were translated into narratives and shared with other researchers in my research team. Also, secondary observations were made of video recordings of creative workshops that Waag facilitated during projects. Observations complemented interviews and documents, particularly in getting a grasp of fleeting behaviors and less tangible beha- viors that informed Waag’s efforts to keep creative processes open-ended.
Gathering visual and textual archival data. Besides interviews and observations, I gathered visual and textual archival data. Examples include project proposals, reports, notes of meetings and strategy documents. Also, video recordings of co-creation sessions that Waag organized appeared helpful as secondary observations of events. The collection of archival data helped to create a richer understanding of the context of creative broke- ring. In particular, it helped to understand how Waag Society members envisioned and planned their work over the course of innovation projects, and to find out what other actors involved in projects expected of them. The archival data also served as handhold to situate interviewees’ accounts,