Page 122 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

110 Design Meets Business
fieldworker not only to learn the social and moral codes of Fjord’s designers but also to gain a rich and ‘polyvocal’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 15) under- standing of the work of designers.
Doing Interviews. As we were interested in the emergence of Service Design within the workplace, most of our interviews were conducted with the designers employed at Fjord. As the work of designers is essentially collaborative (Fayard et al. 2017), this study also takes interest in the wider field of stakeholders involved in the work of designers such as freelancers, Accenture consultants, and clients. Especially relevant were the inter- views conducted with the team members of the design project in which the fieldworker participated. In total, the fieldworker did two to four inter- views with each of the team members. In these interviews, the fieldworker could ask the designers to reflect on the past period and zoom in on chal- lenges and successes. These interviews helped us to nuance our own inter- pretations of events in the field and to better contextualize responses of designers. Perhaps more generally, the interviews with ‘Accenture consult- ants’ and ‘clients’ were mostly aimed at getting an understanding of the external image of designers, and for example, delineate what are expec- tations with respect to design work. Especially the interviews conducted with the clients involved in the project were helpful, as the fieldworker could probe clients’ interpretations of events that she witnessed herself, such as conflicts between clients and designers about office space that were sometimes ignored or seen as ‘irrelevant’ once they passed. In total, the first author conducted around 68 semi-structured interviews with 36 informants and had countless informal conversations with them. Each interview lasted between one to two hours, were recorded and transcribed ad verbatim, sometimes with the help of student assistants. Moreover, doing interviews allowed us not only to get more detailed explanations about emerging struggles between designers but also to cross-check our own observations.
Gathering Documents. The documents the fieldworker gathered included project proposals, strategy documents, trend reports, email conversations and content from Fjord Madrid’s website and Whatsapp group. These documents helped us to get a better sense of the organiza- tion’s structure, how they present their work and moreover communicate with others (e.g. their clients). It was especially relevant to gather docu- ments and other texts saved in the Evernote folder of the design team. This folder included about 258 files and was used as a sort of collective notebook, in which the designers included summaries of client meetings, notes on important decisions, and even intermediate design work (such as transcriptions of user interviews, or visualizations of idea directions). Also,