Page 68 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                56 Design Meets Business
& Whyte 2017) and construct their values (Fayard et al. 2017). Further, the Fjord designers talked about design as a craft, emphasizing that not everyone can be a designer: that one needs to have experience and develop a specific skillset. Finally, the material practices of designers significantly changed due to a major organizational transformation which altered their work practices. Whereas before the key activity of designers at Fjord was designing “screens”, graphic visuals of web designs and user interfaces, they now spend most of their time developing convincing “stories” that help their clients to think from a user perspective.
Conducting an ethnography allowed us to develop insights about the sometimes-implicit responses of designers to their changing material prac- tices at work. Using grounded theory techniques (Strauss & Corbin 1990), we found that designers tried to cope with their increasingly abstract work through leaning back to their habits of making and using artifacts. Designers continued using visualization techniques as well as designing new and labor-intensive tools that they could use while interacting with their clients. As designers felt increasingly disconnected with their work, residing to their former ways of working brought back a sense of joy and downplayed emerging frustrations. At the same time, it allowed them to improve their design skills and enhance their sense of craftsmanship in work. Further, enacting former material practices also allowed the designers to establish a sense of control over ambiguous design processes in which an increasing number of stakeholders participated. Finally, it allowed the designers to display their expertise to their clients while at the same time differentiating themselves from other occupations engaged in service work.
Our findings have theoretical implications for organization studies on design and research on craftsmanship. Seeing designers as craftsmen helps to better understand the work of designers, and in particular the role of material practices in it. In particular, our study nuances the dominant thought that designers use artifacts instrumentally, as a means to develop innovative solutions (Kelley 2001; Stigliani & Fayard 2010; Ravasi & Stig- liani 2012). Building on studies who suggest that designers approach their job as a ‘labor of love’ (Amabile 2018) and recognizing that the values of designers are entwined with their material practices (Fayard et al. 2017), our findings show that designers also make and use artifacts because they want to perfect their craft. Further, our study shows that the responses of designers to changes in their work are different from what the existing literature reveals about knowledge workers (Alvesson 2004; Kärreman & Alvesson 2009). Our findings suggest that because designers are craftsmen, they are entwined with material practices and it might be even more diffi-































































































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