Page 33 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                1. Introduction 21
Design has not only been embraced in corporate worlds but also in the public domain. In a report of the World Economic Forum (2016) it is discussed how organizations can better meet customer expectations through including design thinking in their business processes. Interes- tingly, it is posed that “to succeed, companies will need to evolve into a world of design doing – enhancing their design process with a much deeper understanding of the individual customer context, and at the same time, accelerating the pace at which they develop and take products to market, learning rapidly from customer responses to scale or fail”. In the govern- ment of Canada, they have started the program called ‘Canada beyond 150’ that includes design thinking tools and strategies to train its employees to define policy problems from the citizens’ point of view. Something similar is happening at New York’s Mayor’ office, where there is even an indepen- dent design department installed. Also, in education there is increasing attention for design. Scholars argued for a consideration of design in the field of education, and in particular “to explore the extent to which design thinking can address the problems afflicting business schools” (Dunne & Martin 2006: 512). As of today, most of the vested business schools like Harvard Business School, IESE or Stanford, offer degrees related to design thinking (for more about this, see Chapter 5, the discussion chapter of this dissertation).
While design is praised among many, there are also critical voices. Especially in popular media, a dominant criticism is that design does not have an established deep skill set, and everyone can become a designer by attending ‘crash courses’ or ‘boot camps’. Indeed, popular design schools like Stanford D-School offer online courses in which students can learn ‘how to think like a designer’ and ‘include design thinking into their own skillset’. Another form of critique is that design thinking is ill-defined. In my own fieldwork, a designer said: “Design products. Design the city. Design the government. Design can mean everything and [therefore] risks being nothing at all”. Finally, a common criticism is also that designers might be overly focused on developing products that they can include in their portfolio instead of developing services with significant impact for business (for more context and an explanation for this, see Chapter 2). Moreover, design has raised a lot of expectations as well as its fair share of controversy.
While research on the implications of integrating design in business is growing (Elsbach & Stigliani 2018), we still know little about how these developments shape the work of designers. So, it is time to flip the coin, and explore how designers themselves experience collaborations with busi- ness, and more specifically how this influences their organization of work.































































































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