Page 73 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 61
primarily focused on the overall user experience on digital platforms. The associated outcomes of their work included the development of “screens”, meaning digital visuals of user interfaces or web designs. At this time, only twenty designers worked at Fjord and most of them had a background in ‘interface design’, ‘engineering’ or other technology-related disciplines. In 2013, Fjord was globally acquired by the professional services firm Accen- ture, specialized in offering strategy, consultancy and IT services. This acquisition is seen as the first take-over in a wave of acquisitions of design firms by business that took place between 2013 and 2017 (Maeda 2017). A key motivation of the acquisition of Fjord was that Accenture saw design as a strategic capability, allowing them to enter new markets and attract new clients by offering them an end-to-end service. Especially after the acqui- sition by Accenture in 2013, the work of Fjord designers changed signifi- cantly. Whereas before Fjord was mainly oriented at developing technol- ogies, the designers were increasingly involved in service design projects. The following interview fragment serves as an empirical illustration of this. A designer said:
Our work changed a lot, a lot. [Especially before the acquisition]. We were more limited market wise. We were getting more, a lot of more Spanish projects. So, we were getting a lot more tactical projects, and detailed de- sign [design of finished products]. So, execution work. And mostly banking [projects]. And since we changed to Accenture, we are positioned as bou- tique services, or as they call it ‘we are the tip of the spear’ and open op- portunities [for business]... Now we are doing more strategic design. Like services. [What we do is] more abstract... So, we are not just designing and solving a user experience problem, we are kind of coaching the client to achieve a mindset change a lot more than we did in the past.
So, at Fjord, the work of designers changed from doing “detailed design” to doing more “strategic design”. This is also reflected in type of projects in which Fjord was engaged over the years. Based on the development of our own project database, we saw that the number of strategic projects increased from 15% in 2012 to almost 90% in 2016. Further, in 2015, the design firm officially introduced the role of ‘service designer’ and hired designers that were trained in the newly founded service design schools such as ‘Hyper Island’. In our findings, we further explore how the material practices of designers changed in this context of organizational transfor- mation. Before doing so, we first explain how we collected and analyzed the data for this paper.































































































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