Page 126 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

114 Design Meets Business
defined and designers were dealing with the consequences of moving into the field of business. We moved between data and theory during our entire data analysis.
Thematic analysis. In order to look more closely at the internal strug- gles with respect to developing an occupational mandate among designers at Fjord, we returned to our observational data and our case narrative about the project. Through tracking discussions and tensions in the project in which the fieldworker participated, we were able to empirically identify three themes around which struggles repeatedly emerged: space, time and clients. To better understand how designers constructed the occupational mandate, we finally explored the implications of the negotiation processes among designers. In order to achieve this, we went back to our data and specifically our fieldnotes of the project the fieldworker followed. What soon appeared to us, was that the discussions between designers often remained unresolved, at best provided temporary settlements around their occupational mandate. Only in rare occasions, when both parties, for example, had a clear common enemy (e.g. the client of ACN consultant) or were under a lot of time pressure, the designers collaborated and developed an agreement that moved beyond the design communities’ preferences. Interestingly, and different from what we read in, for example, the work of Fayard and colleagues (2017), our data also showed that designers appear to accommodate to each other ‘frontstage’, e.g. when seeing clients, but then compete with one another about ‘how work ought to be done’ in the more ‘backstage’ domains of their work, e.g. when they were having project meetings. We outline our findings in more detail below.
3.4. Findings
3.4.1. Occupational ambiguity and heterogeneity among designers
Designers at Fjord all identified their work as ‘Service Design’. In theory, all the designers could recite what Service Design is and what values are associated with it. Yet, in practice, we saw that designers experi- enced a lot of ‘occupational ambiguity’, ambiguity around ‘what a Service Designer ought to do’. In particular, the designers experienced unclarity around what are core tasks and what is the most suitable approach to doing Service Design.
Similar to what Fayard and colleagues (2017) discovered in their study of Service Designers, all the designers at Fjord defined Service Design according to their ethos. They believed that co-creation, empathy, and holism