Page 14 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2 Design Meets Business
to conduct embedded research. It allows me to do what I love most: get to know people and understand how they give meaning to their life. To connect their stories to existing theories, and explain why people do what they do.
For my dissertation I chose to study the changing work of creatives. Since I was young, I have been interested in creativity. Equipped with quite an imagination, I have always loved the process of creating and discovering something new. In particular, I enjoy the experience of being in a creative flow. In such moments, time softens out while it actually passes by rapidly. When I participated in the National Think Tank in 2013, I first came into touch with creativity as a domain of work. During an innovation workshop, I learned that creativity is not just about using tools and techniques, but it is also about moving people out of their comfort zone and letting them engage in collaborative behaviors. I was so fascinated by the organization of creativity that I worked at the Creative Leadership School THNK after the Think Tank finished.
My thirst for better understanding creative work and organizing was not satisfied. I picked up my connections with the academic world again. I combined my job at THNK with a teaching position at the Organiza- tion Studies department, until I found a PhD position at KIN. Because of my interest in what creative workers do to spark digital innovation, my first study was at the innovation hub Waag Society. Here I conducted a qualitative case study that I presented at various conferences. The study turned into a work about how creative workers help their clients to become creative by acting as ‘ceremony masters’ and facilitating liminality - a trans- formative experience in which people move from one state of being into another state of being (see Chapter 4).
After my fieldwork at Waag, I felt the need for a more immersive research experience. In particular, I wanted to know more about the crea- tive work of designers. One of the reasons to study design as a subset of the creative industries was mainly because popular management studies signaled that design was ‘the new thing’ in business. Further, my personal experience with design at the ThinkTank and THNK sparked my inte- rest into this specific domain of work. I remember the moment when I decided to study design perfectly. I was holding the Harvard Business Review edition (2015) in my hands. The cover of the magazine read “Design Thinking Comes of Age”, alarming the rising popularity of design in business and the ongoing wave of acquisitions of design firms by business consultan- cies. This brought me to do ethnography at Fjord, a design firm in Madrid that was recently acquired by management consultancy Accenture.
Fjord offered a revelatory case of collaborations between creatives and business professionals. Over a period of 17 months I travelled back and forth