ANALISIS PARA LA INVESTIGACION DE ARROZ

The selection of the participants was purposive as is typical in narrative analysis (Riessman 2008). My main concern was ensuring diversity of participants, which is vital for capturing the rich context of industrial design practice in Turkey. To achieve this, I selected participants considering their age, involvement in professional life, the city and the university in which they studied design, the sectors and companies in which they have worked and the positions they have held in these companies. In addition to diversity, participants’ interest in the subject matter and enthusiasm for telling gender stories was crucial. Thus, in the selection process whenever I met a participant candidate who stated that s/he had a lot to say regarding gender issues/relations, or whenever a gatekeeper recommended a particular designer for whom gender had been an issue in professional life, I prioritised them. Also, participants were expected to have been in work life for some time. Recently established industrial design departments of universities and recently graduated industrial designers were not taken into consideration purposefully.

In getting access to participants my background provided a great advantage. Being a former practitioner who actively participated in design exhibitions, workshops and study groups, I

was already familiar with the industrial design community. Colleagues with whom I studied at university or worked with in industry and design academics and practitioners I met at such events were the main gatekeepers who I expected to direct me to potential participants.

For me it was very easy to contact my colleagues. Through e-mails I briefly explained the topic of my study and why and how I needed their help. In some cases I simply asked whether they knew anyone who could be helpful for this study, while in some others I was more specific and asked for people who would meet certain criteria. For example, in one case I already had information regarding the design team of a big company, such as how many designers worked there, how many of them were women and which universities they were from. Then I asked a colleague of mine who was then working in that company to recommend me a senior member of the design team who had also graduated from a university in Istanbul if possible, and to provide me with this person’s e-mail address. I also mentioned the confidentiality issues, asking my colleagues not to share my approach with any one apart from the potential participant. I explained that confidentiality was paramount in this study since I was dealing with a respectively small and close community, and participants could be identified by their colleagues who shared the same work environment once it was known that they had taken part in my research. In this process some of my colleagues were offended by my interest in other designers instead of themselves. Some of them frankly asked why I did not interview them or whether I did not find them worth interviewing. When I encountered such questions, I explained the issues regarding credibility and trustworthiness that interviewing the people I had already known would bring out.

In addition to my being a former practitioner, the research assistant position I hold at METU Industrial Design Department was also useful in this process. As a member of staff I had access to the list of the companies with whom the department has collaborated for graduation projects. The list mainly consists of big manufacturers from a variety of industrial sectors in Turkey, such as electronic equipment, furniture, electrical household products, transportation, lighting and ceramic products. Among these companies I selected the ones that employ in-house industrial designers, preferably in teams. Considering that in-house designers are not as easily accessible as freelance designers in general, obtaining the list was valuable particularly since it includes contact details of at least one member of every design team.

In addition, via the older members of the academic staff, I could get the names and contact details of senior graduates who constitute the first generation of industrial designers in Turkey. Otherwise it would have been challenging to find senior design graduates who have worked with the industrial designer title since their graduation, as there were not a lot of job opportunities in the profession’s infant years and many graduates had to work in jobs unrelated or partially-related to the profession (see earlier discussion at Chapter 4).

Still, at some points my background fell short. My being a graduate of and research assistant at METU Industrial Design Department, which is the oldest industrial design department at a technical university in Turkey, of course enabled me to obtain access easily to a broad range of industrial designers. However, this also limited my contacts to METU graduates to a certain extent. Although tracking the design teams of big companies provided me with the graduates of other universities as well, they were in small numbers compared to METU graduates. In order to overcome this problem, I developed a couple of strategies. First, I contacted some members of academic staff in other universities in Istanbul and Eskisehir and asked whether they could suggest to me some of their former students, classmates or any senior industrial designers who work as part-time lecturers in these universities.

Then I prepared a table to keep a record of the diversity in potential participants. The table included all the information I got before and during the selection process: name, sex, form of employment (self-employed or in-house), the company, sector and city in which the designer works, university and graduation year, name of reference and contact details. After sorting the information, I listed potential participants in order of priority and started to send e-mails accordingly. In the first round I kept my e-mail short, introduced myself and my study, mentioned the people who recommended them, and explained why they were selected to participate in this study. Once they responded positively, I sent a second e-mail with more detail regarding the interview, and with the attached participant information sheet and consent form. In my e-mails my signature also included the link to my personal web site, where they can find all my professional work and my updated cv. This would also enable them to find a mutual colleague to ask questions about me, so that they would be able collect information about myself if they liked, just as I could do about them (see next section for how this strategy worked).

The e-mailing process started in October 2009, after I completed working on the two test interviews, which were conducted in July 2009. The selection process was organised separately for the first and second rounds of interviews, which were conducted between December 2009 and January 2010, and July and August 2010 respectively. Doing the fieldwork in two rounds was useful as I was able to contact the people who agreed to participate but were not available in the first round again for the second round.

Overall I got positive response. Among the designers I contacted, only five people did not want to participate due to personal reasons. Apart from them, participant candidates were generally supportive, indicating that they would be happy to participate as long as they were available in the period of my visits to Turkey. Some of them took this as helping me, whilst others as a ‘mission’ that would contribute to the profession of industrial design.

In total this research has 20 female and 12 male participants who had work experiences in ten different cities in Turkey. The three tables below, Table 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3, which aim to provide a summary of the interview sample in terms of key characteristics, were compiled from the background data I collected both before and throughout the interviews.

Graduation year Number of

women Number of men Total

Until 1980 1 1 2

1981-1990 4 1 5

1991-2000 3 3 6

2001-2005 12 7 19

Table 5.1. Participants’ distribution according to graduation year from university

As Table 5.1 demonstrates, 19 of 32 participants have entered professional life after 2000. The distribution of participants in this table shows the difficulty of finding industrial design graduates who have worked with the industrial designer title prior to the 2000s due to the lack of an interest and the scarcity of job opportunities for industrial designers in the Turkish industry. One of the participants graduated between 1981-1990 was retired, and another one graduated between 1991-2000 had left industry to become an academic after six years’

experience. Apart from these two, all participants were still working, either as in-house or self-employed designers. Some of them experienced both forms of employment as Table 5.2 shows below during their careers.

Form of employment Number of

women Number of men Total

In-house 13 8 21

Self-employed 2 1 3

Experienced both forms

of employment 5 3 8

Table 5.2. Participants’ distribution according to form of employment

Industrial sector Number of

women Number of men Total

Furniture 7 4 11

Packaging 2 2 4

Lighting 1 - 1

Electronic equipment

(inc. electronic consumer goods and communication devices)

4 1 5

Electrical household devices

(inc. white goods and kitchen appliances) 1 1 1

Transportation 1 3 4

Capital goods

(inc. devices for professional purposes, i.e. military products and funfair machines; and construction machines and tools)

3 2 5

Home and office accessories

(inc. kitchenware and glassware) 4 1 5 Sports, hobby, game, and personal products (inc.

jewellery, bags, and other fashion accessories) 4 1 5 Building components

(inc. sanitaryware, heating devices, electrical fittings, and related furnishing products)

4 2 6

Whilst 15 participants (12 in-house, 3 both) have worked for one single industrial sector, 17 participants have work experiences in more than one industrial sector. I show the industrial sectors for which participants have worked during their professional lives in Table 5.3 above, where I classified the industrial sectors according to the product classification of ETMK (see Section 4.4 above for a discussion of this classification).