Page 78 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                66 Design Meets Business
the fieldworker developed a project database in which she included all the projects Fjord completed since 2011 (as there was only data available on projects from this moment on). She categorized the projects on the basis of ‘type of project’, ‘client’, ‘industry’, ‘roles involved’, and ‘whether the project came in via Accenture or not’. Developing the table helped us make explicit how the nature of the work of designers changed over time. Besides collecting data about existing projects, we also paid attention to written text, visual material and other secondary sources that designers themselves developed. Again, especially the data collected in the project was helpful. The designers summarized their interactions with each other, end-users and clients on the digital platform Evernote. In total, 258 notes were shared in the Evernote team folder. Further, the fieldworker collected project documents such as proposals, deliverables and presentations that the team archived in the sharing platform Box. Finally, the fieldworker also collected data about the artifacts that the designers used and made, such the drafts of design solutions, prototypes for workshops and slide-decks for presentations. Taken together, gathering archival data was helpful to develop a richer contextual background to our insights.
2.3.3. Process of Analysis
As with other forms of qualitative research, when doing ethnography, the data collection occurs congruently with processes of analyzing data (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007; Lofland & Lofland 2006). Our data anal- ysis has been done on the basis of grounded theory techniques (Strauss & Corbin 1990). Our inductive approach included different elements, which are presented chronologically but were often overlapping in practice.
Summarizing first impressions through memos and empirical narratives. First, while writing fieldnotes, the fieldworker marked inter- esting events and wrote memo’s (in total 104 typed pages) about this. These memos were discussed in collaborative meetings with the other authors. After returning from the field, the fieldworker immersed herself for about half a year in an in-depth writing process. In this period, she wrote six empirical narratives (about 300 typed pages). These narratives were descrip- tive and covered a broad domain of topics, among which ‘the culture at Fjord’, ‘the design project’ that we observed, ‘the acquisition by Accen- ture’. Writing these narratives helped the fieldworker to externalize her knowledge – that was very much embodied in that moment- and share her insights in a more coherent manner with the other authors.
Exploring the emergent theme of ‘material practices’. A core insight that evolved when writing the narrative was that the material practices





























































































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