Page 103 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 91
artifacts in studying work and organizing (Comi & Whyte 2018; Sergeeva, Huysman & Faraj 2015) instead of understanding the two as separate units. Further, by seeing designers as craftsmen, we shift attention to the emotional connection between designers and their work. Designers do not only see their work as a jurisdictional domain over which they need to create and maintain control (Fayard et al. 2017), but also a ‘labor of love’ (Amabile 2018). In making and using artifacts like the board game Pensiopoly, we show that material practices allow the designers to inti- mately connect with their work. Indeed, it was especially in the moments of making sketches, refining their designs and presenting their concepts, that the designers experienced fun in their work and came into a ‘creative flow’. So far, scholars have acknowledged that emotional experiences, such as sensing ‘delight’ and ‘empathy’, are key in developing design cultures (Elsbach and Stigliani 2018), attitudes (Michlewski 2016) and design outcomes (Ewenstein and Whyte 2018; Kolko 2015), but scholars have not yet explained why for designers it is important to personally connect with their work. The lack of attention to emotions can be a consequence of the fact that organizational research approached emotions as the domain of psychology and other cognitive sciences, and it only recently moved into
the domain of work and organizing (e.g. Elsbach & Bechky 2018).
2.5.2 Better understanding how craftsmen respond to changing work
Our study helps to better understand how designers respond to changing work, shifting attention from the knowledge practices to the material practices of people. In organizational studies, scholars mostly explore the consequences of changing work for knowledge practices. For example, Zuboff (1988) showed that the introduction of digital technologies in paper mills substituted the knowledge practices of operators’, replacing their intuitive and sensory knowledge with fact-based information. Such studies highlight that when work changes, for example because of the introduc- tion of a new technology (Barley 1986; Zammuto et al. 2007; Leonardi & Barley 2008), people need to adapt their expertise and skills. Our findings, however, show that work changes can also have profound consequences for material practices of people. In particular, we show that designers cannot let go of their previous ways of working, let alone replacing their exper- tise and skillset entirely. Moreover, changing work might be difficult when material practices are central in work, for example in the case of craftsmen (Sennett 2008) or in emergent occupations which there are no formal bodies of knowledge yet (Abbott 1988; Fayard et al. 2017).