Digital Work Futures: Adopting and adapting to AI-infused platforms in the digital and creative industries

The interdisciplinary Digital Work Futures research environment (DWF) studies how digital transformations shape the future of work in the digital and creative industries, specifically in the areas of web, games and communications that are at the forefront of digitalisation.

Using a tailored ethnographic methodology that advances theoretical scholarship and methodological practice in this area, DWF explores and explains how and why digital professionals adopt and adapt to existing and emerging AI-infused platforms and thereby shape their digital work futures.

Such a people-oriented focus on the mundane experiences of these technologies is essential since this research field is shrouded with extreme and spectacular examples. Systematic empirical analyses of these core aspects of digitalisation, beyond the hype, are needed. Two research questions guide our work:1.

How do digital professionals in the digital and creative industries experience, anticipate, and adopt emerging and evolving AI-infused platforms?2.

How is the evolving distribution of work, spatially and temporally, experienced, anticipated, and adapted to digital advances and innovations?Answering these questions allows us to generate a comprehensive empirical, theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that facilitates an engagement with probable, plausible and possible work futures.

Such a processual perspective captures the societal consequences of digitalisation as they are being shaped into facts over time.