Page 125 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 113
Inductive analysis of field notes and transcripts. Another impor- tant part of the analysis was to read through our transcripts and field notes over and over again, marking important passages. Already when reading the fieldworker’s first notes in the field, we discovered that designers seemed insecure about what they were doing. They said things like “we do not know what is expected of us”, suggesting that the occupation of Service Design is emergent. At the same time, designers highlighted that their work had gone through a lot of changes in the past years. In interviews, Fjord designers especially emphasized the impact of the acquisition. They highlighted that since the take-over the design studio almost doubled its number projects and the workforce grew a lot and the composition of design teams changed. We learned from our interviews, that over the past years, there has been an influx of designers at Fjord with a background in business, such as business graduates with an interest in Service Design. These ‘business’ designers had different skills, education, and visions with respect to Service Design, then the designers that were already employed by Fjord. The latter mostly had a background in traditional design disci- plines, such as product design.
Moving between theory and data. All of this sparked our interest in further investigating the occupational emergence of Service Design. Before diving into our data, we read more about the historical devel- opment of Service Design. We returned to our case narratives, practi- tioner journals and online reports. In particular, we found the study of Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky (2017) and practitioner journals (especially Harvard Business Review 2015 ‘Design coming of Age’) enlightening, as it explained in detail that Service Design became more and more popular in today’s service economy in which businesses do not only want to offer their customers products (e.g. designing a passenger seat in an airplane) but feel the need to design the entire customer experience (e.g. the entire flight journey including the design of a passenger seat). Conse- quently, the work of designers moved upstream, towards designing inno- vation processes and strategies for business. The literature showed that designers shared commonalities among each other (e.g. through defining a common ‘ethos’) that differentiated them from other occupations (Fayard et al. 2017; Stigliani & Fayard 2010). Yet, our observations so far, indicated that within the occupation of Service Design, designers were struggling a lot over what are their commonalities. An explanation for this discrepancy might be that existing research on the emergence of Service Design was done in its initial beginnings when designers had the need to find ‘like-minded’ colleagues, and our study took place several years later when the initial foundations of the occupation were already