Page 132 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

120 Design Meets Business
understand it. That’s why I prefer to be a hybrid designer. I have a bit of visual, a bit of this and a bit of that.”
Here, a visual designer explained ‘service’ on the level of ‘drawing
a box’, and hence also saw it as part of his work as a designer. The frag- ment suggests that craft designers saw Service Design as part of what they are doing, an addition to their design skills rather than entirely defining their work. Moreover, the business designers and the craft designers have different approaches and ideas about how work should be done. In our anal- ysis, we found that heterogeneity among designers was particularly mani- fested around the ways in which designers interacted with ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘clients’. These themes are visualized in Table 3.2 and discussed next.
3.4.2. Appropriating space
For all designers, space was of vital importance to their work. A designer with a background in advertising said: “Yeah, the physicality is an important dimension [of design work]. We have space, we work with space and [this makes us] stand out.” During our fieldwork, we repeatedly saw designers putting efforts in creating a ‘right’ environment for doing design work. They achieved this for example by decorating their work- space with all sorts of artifacts associated with design practices, such as posters, photos, printouts of design solutions, Post-Its, Lego and Sharpies as becomes clear in the following fragment of fieldnotes:
“This is the project room”, [client] Richard says after which he looks at the design team. When I [fieldworker] look around, I see about twelve desks facing each other, accompanied by chairs and storage cabinets. The win- dow blinds are half closed, and the light in the room is dim. It is quiet, and the atmosphere is calm. I count four people in the room. One of them says “Good morning!”. The designers stand next to each other. They are quiet as well. Their eyes scan the room as if they are searching for something in specific. Ron, the client, interrupts the silence by pointing at a group of desks on the left side of the room. He says: “you can work here the coming period”. He adds that the designers also have the option to meet in one of the three meeting rooms. The meeting rooms are part of the same space, separated by glass walls. Richard then turns to the designers and asks if the workspace is “useful”. Nadia, the project lead and business designer, responds: ‘it will do’ but she looks disappointed. Her eyes catch those of Cleo who stands next to her. Cara, the project manager of the design team, then says that for the design team it is important ‘to move in the room’. She explains this as the ability ‘to use the walls for posters, draw on flip overs,