Page 100 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

88 Design Meets Business
hanging on the wall (see Picture 7) while another designer made pictures of the event. The pictures were ultimately included in one of the status reports as well as in the slide deck for the final presentation.
Designers did not only create their own artifacts, but sometimes also appropriated the artifacts that clients developed. For example, towards the end of the project we followed, the designers gave the preview of their final presentation. In the middle of the presentation, the clients interrupted the designers and said that they were “completely lost”. They expressed the need for an overview of where they were in the design process and how the various design outcomes related to one another:
“I need some story, we need a story. In my opinion, if you have the visuals of all the outputs, the customer journey, the blueprint and visualize them, maybe in a cartoon, accompanied with some words or bullet points, then we have the story. Then we have one overview [of the designers’ work]. [...] We need this visual to show the whole story, on a high level.”
As this fragment shows, the clients doubted “the story” of the designers, they expected from the designers a visual overview about the design processes. In response to this, the design lead started to verbally explain steps of the design process. While the design lead was talking, the client himself pulled over the Flip-Over, that was standing in the corner of the room, and started visualizing the words of the design lead on a poster. When he finished, the other clients looked at the poster and noted that “things are much clearer now”. To close this event, as a matter of a joke, the client lead and design team made a picture in front of the poster. A few weeks later, during the final presentation, the designers digitized the poster. It now functioned as a sort of ‘boundary object’ (Carlile 2002) around which the designers and clients could communicate. What is particularly inter- esting here is that the clients used the artifacts, the Flip-over and poster, and the material practices, the visualizing, that the designers normally used. By bringing the new version of the poster to the final presentation, the designers enhanced the legitimacy around their work: not only because they expressed that they listened to the clients but also because they visu- alized their design decisions and work processes.
Moreover, this section shows that even though designers had the formal authority to develop solutions for their clients, making and using artifacts helped designers to differentiate themselves from other occupa- tions through their connoisseurship of design. Making prototypes and visual objects also helped designers to communicate to their clients what was on their minds, to give clients insights into their design processes by