Page 48 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                36 Design Meets Business
of this fieldwork took place in Spain, mostly in the office of the designers in the Madrid Studio and sometimes also at the Accenture office. Mainly in the beginning of my field research, my focus was on creating a mutual sense of familiarity. In order to achieve this, I conducted interviews. My interview sample was informed by a combination of a snowball-sampling strategy and a random sampling strategy (Emerson et al. 1995). The stra- tegy director Luca, who helped me gaining access to Fjord, suggested me to speak with some people, designers or clients, and those people again recommended me to speak with other people. Also, I randomly approa- ched designers for interviews, and on a more unstructured basis, grasped whatever opportunity I saw to conduct interviews. I saw doing inter- views not only as a means of gathering information, but also as a means of ‘befriending’ and establish ‘rapport’ with my informants.
In total I did 67 interviews with 55 people, among which 32 desig- ners, 6 Accenture consultants, 3 freelancers and 6 clients of Fjord (tota- ling to 79,2 hours). Interviewing such a broad array of actors helped me to develop a heterogeneous perspective on what it means to work at Fjord. In interviews, I asked the informants to reflect on the last Fjord project they did, how they perceived their own role and that of the designers in it, what surprised them and what they saw as challenges. Especially, I asked them to support their reflections with real-life examples. Interviewing the designers was especially helpful to get an ‘inside view’ and better unders- tand how the designers perceived and performed their work. It helped me develop a more concrete image of what they considered key challenges of the acquisition by Accenture and overall, moving into the domain of busi- ness. Interviewing the Accenture consultants helped me to nuance the stories of designers. In particular, it was useful to better understand the motivations of acquiring Fjord, their expectations of the work of desig- ners and what they considered unresolved problems. The interviews with Fjord’s clients helped me to better understand why certain challenges in projects emerged, and what the external image that Fjord conveys to its audiences is. Finally, interviewing freelancers helped me to compare the work of Fjord designers with that of other designers, and was especially helpful in discovering what behavioural patterns are worth exploring further. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed during fieldwork or after I returned from the field, with the help of student assistants.
In addition to interviews, I did observations. In particular, I took the role of a ‘shadowing observant’ (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007). I followed the designers to their formal meetings, such as weekly breakfast meetings, design clinics and professional meetings. Also, I tried to ‘strategically hang around’ whenever and wherever possible (Watson 2011). At Fjord, designers































































































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