Page 121 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 109
worker used a combination of qualitative methods to get a general appreci- ation of organizing and work at Fjord. In particular, the fieldworker partic- ipated for over eight months, between September 2016 and April 2017, in a design project4 as a ‘design researcher’. Being part of the team, allowed her to work alongside the other designers on a daily basis. In accordance with doing ethnography (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007), in terms of data collection, the focus was mostly on doing participant observation.
Conducting Participant Observations and Making Fieldnotes.
Most of our observations were done by the fieldworker in the design studio of Fjord in Madrid, with the exception of a few instances when the designers worked at the client’s offices in the Netherlands. The fieldworker observed all sorts of meetings between designers, varying from formal presentations to clients and social events after work. It was especially useful to observe team meetings during the design project. It was in such meetings in which designers reflected on what they ‘ought to do’ to reach deadlines and reflected on their past experiences. Also, in such moments, the clashing beliefs and behaviors designers were most evident. In total, 55 of these meetings were recorded and transcribed, those meetings that could not be recorded - for example because this was not allowed or there were too many voices on record - were captured by making field notes. Besides meetings, the fieldworker also observed the daily work activities of designers, such as core tasks, how decisions are made with respect to the design process and client interactions, interesting discussions at the coffee machine or during lunch break. To capture the interactions as they unfold, the field- worker made real-time notes on her laptop. She especially paid attention to naturally occurring interpretations of designers (e.g. when they reflected on their own design work), their own reproductions of dialogue (e.g. When they reported on conversations they had with clients) and practices that reflect their perspective with respect to Service Design (e.g. spending a lot of time on certain tasks they considered important). In particular, the fieldworker wrote down notes of moments in which designers were discussing their core activities and approaches to work. When the field- worker returned home at the end of the day, she further added details to these notes and marked situations that in particular captured attention. Notes were also shared with the second author, and if needed elaborated. Altogether, this resulted in 382 typed pages of field notes, and on top of the digital pages also 8 fully-written notebooks that include jottings and drawings. Observing meetings and daily activities of designers allowed the
4 In the findings section of this paper, we mostly use data from this project.