Page 129 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 117
each other up to date about the ways in which it changed former behaviors of end-users or business clients.
Yet, at the same time, during fieldwork it became evident that for designers it was not clear at all ‘what a Service Designer ought to do’, and in contrary, what tasks are outside of their jurisdictional domain. In other words, we found that Fjord designers experienced significant occupational ambiguity. In conversations, the designers explained that the occupa- tional ambiguity was a result of the novelty of Service Design. Only in the last three years, especially after the acquisition by Accenture in 2013, the designers were mainly practicing Service Design. “We are still standing in our children shoes. Every day we learn more about what it is that we do”, a designer said. Other designers made comments like: “it is super vague to me what I need to do in projects” and “we are all confused about what we do”. One designer highlighted the ambiguity she experienced around her work, by comparing Service Design with a “swiss-army knife” that has different applications and functions. She said: “it can be everything. Service Design can be innovation, strategy and even education. There is no clear line [between Service Design and other work areas].”
Occupational ambiguity became especially clear in the endless discus- sions that designers had among themselves about how to behave and what approach to apply to move their work forward. These discussions mostly took place ‘backstage’, when the designers were in private settings like their project room, and not vis a vis their clients. Through following a design team over the course of a project, the first author captured numerous discussions between designers that signaled occupational ambiguity. See, for example, the following fragment of fieldnotes that captures a discussion between designers who are exploring possible directions for design solutions:
Carrie: [laughs when she sees an image of a Virtual Reality booth and asked the other designers] is that not marketing?
Jane: yes, super marketing
Joe [visual designer]: yeah.. is that part of service design?
Carrie: we step into other fields, of marketing, communication.
Nadia: I think it is service design.
Joe: Service? But this is about ‘how you can engage customers’?
Nadia: No... we go one level above it. We have to find a way to engage the customer earlier. If that involves a bit of advertising and marketing than that is it. We do not have to design an awareness campaign, but just need to define the first steps to engage the customer. I get what they [clients] say, the engagement model is not enough. If we translate this [the design concept] into something more experiential, then... of course there is mar-