Page 80 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                68 Design Meets Business
artifacts helped designers to bring back ‘fun’ in their work and establish an emotional connection to work. Further, we found that designers sensed that their design processes became more ambiguous and that they feared losing control over design processes which included increasing number of stakeholders. Making artifacts helped them to establish a sense of control over design processes. Further, producing and using artifacts enabling the designers to differentiate their professional identity from other service workers that engaged in similar work practices. At this point, we devel- oped the first draft of our paper.
Relating our empirical insights to existing theory. Throughout our process of analysis, we constantly moved back and forth between data and theory (van Maanen et al. 2007). Especially, we turned to the literature to understand how researchers previously conceptualized material practices in design work. We found that in the literature the emphasis has been placed on how designers use artifacts as ‘tools’ to achieve certain outcomes (e.g. Stigliani & Fayard 2010). Our data analysis indeed showed that designers used artifacts to achieve certain outcomes, namely gaining control over design processes or differentiating from other occupations. Yet, both existing research and our data also suggested that designers performed certain material practices as part of their ‘ethos’ (Fayard et al. 2017) and to emotionally connect with their work. To better understand this, we found the literature on craftsmanship helpful in which it is acknowledged that people can be entwined with their material practices. Adopting the lens of craftsmanship helped us to better understand the designers’ responses to their changing work. In particular, on the one hand it helped us to recog- nize that designers might cling on material practices because as craftsman they are entwined with it, and on the other hand, as an emergent occu- pation, they do not yet have a formalized body of knowledge and hence differentiate themselves on the basis of these material practices.
2.4. Findings
2.4.1. Changing material practices of Fjord designers
The material practices of the designers at design firm Fjord have been changing in the past decade. Especially before the acquisition by Accen- ture, most of the design projects at Fjord were focused on developing new technologies. In particular, designers said that the outcomes of their work included “screens”, graphical user interfaces and web designs. The aim of building “screens” was developing an online customer experience that is beautiful and functional for users. Especially after the acquisition





























































































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