Page 86 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                74 Design Meets Business
Yet, in the days after, the designers spend almost all their work time on designing Pensiopoly. Day in, day out, the designers made sketches and build prototypes. They spend hours on discussing the rules and “mechanics” of the game. Especially, a designer named ‘Carrie’3 was excited about making the board game. She often times mentioned how happy she was that she “could finally draw something again”. She elaborated on this in an interview:
For me, this project is similar to other projects. It can be really boring to design banks or financial services (...) So, [I thought] let’s use this chance for me on a personal level to try something different. So at least I’ve done something that I am happy about and proud of. Then, maybe, it [the board game] does not work even though it cost us a lot of time. Well... that is ok. Because we tried something different, we innovated this method and it was good, we had so much fun in making it.
Carrie here suggests that she made Pensiopoly primarily for personal reasons. Among others, it allows her to bring back a sense of happiness and pride in her work. Also, Jane, another team member, said that making Pensiopoly allowed her to personally connect with her work:
[We do this] for personal development, we can learn something. As de- signers we need to keep on learning, expanding our design toolkit. I never made a game before. We can try out new skills ... We have been interview- ing for weeks now, and we are all tired and stressed, let’s do something exciting.
Here, Jane suggests that making Pensiopoly allowed her to expand her design skills and to do something “exciting” after a period of doing inter- views, which she primarily labelled as stressful. In total, it took the team on and off almost two weeks, out of the in total five weeks of the ‘describe phase’ in the project, to develop the board game.
Interestingly, after the design team used Pensiopoly in user interviews, the field worker asked if the designers intended to show the board game to their clients. So far, the clients were not aware of the development of Pensiopoly. As a response, one of the designers said with a surprising voice: “why? I do not need to prove him anything. I do this for myself”. What this empirical example shows, is that the designers made artifacts like Pensi- opoly primarily for personal reasons, to emotionally connect with their work while battling frustrations that emergently developed in and around their work.




























































































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