Page 133 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 121
and make noise if that is needed’. Richard said that he did not ‘foresee a problem’ with respect to this. He then walked to a flip-over at the other side of the room and pulled it towards the workspace of the designers. He said: “you can use this for now”, after which he said that there was a possi- bility to reserve another flip-over if needed.
After a short coffee break, the design team walks back to the project room. Almost immediately, they start to move the furniture. They make jokes and have fun while doing so. Within fifteen minutes, their workspace looks different: instead of a collection of desks, several desks now form one large table, which is cluttered with personal belongings and station- ary. Also, the walls and cabinets are decorated with posters. The posters are full of post-its, on which research insights are written. On one of the cabinets, there is a box with post-its, pencils, and markers. The project lead and business designer said: “they [the clients] need to get used to these ma- terials”. Cara, the project manager, moves the whiteboard from one side of the room to the other side of the room. She then asks the client if he also has a Flip over. After around twenty minutes, the designers ‘are done’ and take a seat on the table.
Here, the designers put efforts into developing a work environment that breathes their creative identity and is different from typical corporate offices. Through hanging posters on the wall, displaying all sorts of design artifacts and rearranging the furniture, they create a workspace that trig- gers innovative behaviors. What is particularly remarkable, is these field notes suggest that turning their workspace into a creative space is a taken- for-granted practice. Without preliminary discussion or division of tasks, the designers grasped whatever they brought with them to create a ‘right’ work environment.
As fieldwork progressed, we discovered that for designers it is not only important to work in a creative environment, but also one that is separated from their clients. “Our own space is sacred”, one of them said. During the kick-off meeting of the project we followed, one of the designers asked the client:
“Is there a place where we can work with the walls easily? and sometimes we are a bit noisy and we do not want to disturb people so that is why we want to isolate a little bit. And [we need] Wi-Fi... that is the minimum we can work with”.
Indeed, our field research showed that designers preferred to work in a space to which only they have exclusive access. A space in which they