Page 119 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 107
3.3. Methods
3.3.1. Research setting
We did an ethnography of Service Designers at the design consultancy Fjord to explore how an occupational mandate is negotiated in action. Fjord is a top-tier service design consultancy (Maeda 2018), specialized in developing customer experiences by designing digital products and services. Fjord opened its doors in 2001 and was globally acquired in 2013 by the well-established technology management consultancy Accenture. This acquisition is seen in the media as starting a wave of acquisitions of design firms by management consultancies. In 2017, Fjord had 28 studios in places like Helsinki and New York, with a headcount of 800 employees in total. The fieldwork as performed by the first author, from here on ‘the fieldworker’, took place at Fjord’s Madrid studio. During data collection, this studio employed around 40 designers and 15 managers. Because this study is an ethnographic analysis of intra-occupational dynamics within one organization, it cannot directly address how an occupational mandate is constructed at the professional field level. However, investigating how in one firm diverse occupational members struggle to define commonalities does further advance our understanding by which occupational mandates are constructed, challenged and changed in the workplace.
The emergence of Service Design offers an excellent setting for exploring how an occupational mandate is (re)negotiated between occupational members in the workplace for several reasons. First, it is still in its infancy phase. Despite having gained an occupational foothold, the designers still referred to Service Design as emergent and emphasized that their occu- pation had little institutional and legal constituents. For example, they suggested that their work was still ‘embryonic’, by saying things like “we are so young, we need to learn” and “we are emergently defining what we do”. In other words, designers are in the middle of the process of defining their occupational mandate. Further, especially since the occupation of Service Design is growing in number, designers are pushed to define what they do and how it differs from other occupations. In particular, as the popularity of design in business is growing, organizations are now more aware of what design processes entail. Some organizations even have Service Design in their own offering, which might pressure the members of the occupation Service Design to redefine their roles and contributions.
Finally, while still in its infancy, the occupation is changing. Espe- cially, the occupation is attracting many ‘newcomers’ and as a result, heter- ogeneity inside the occupation is heightening. This is reflected in the