Page 136 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

124 Design Meets Business
of such moments was at the beginning of the project we followed. As the fragment above already suggested, the designers needed to work in the office space of clients for the first few weeks of the project. As the clients were used to share the workspace with ‘external parties’, they placed their desk next to that of the designers for the first days. Yet this created upheaval among the designers, as one of the clients reflected on it during an interview:
“They [designers] perceived it as a threat that I was sitting with the team. Like ‘ehhh, a client who is sitting next to me’, you know that feeling. Then we decided that I will sit upstairs for a few days, to give them some air. So apparently, they had a feeling like ‘wow, this client is a bit too much on top of the process. He is checking on us’. They had the feeling that they did not have enough room to maneuver, to play.”
While all the designers preferred to work in a private space, they did not agree among themselves what this means in practice. Especially, craft designers expressed their concerns about sharing their workspace with clients. One of them said:
“I mean, why are you [clients] staying here? It’s like, we used to have this checkpoint, an in the other moments we work on our own because you’re freer to do stuff... If clients don’t keep me inspired, comfortable, because of their comments or the circumstances, I feel frustrated and I feel angry, mad or whatever... and then they won’t get 100% of us. With the same team, you can deliver a good or a shitty project... So, you need to give me my space for work, and to be focused and to do my process. So, I need walls, post its, intimacy, those things. I need a space for fun and to disconnect.”
Nadia, a business designer and project lead, noticed that the design team was tensed because of the presence of clients in the workspace. Instead of asking the clients to leave the workspace of designers completely, she asked the clients to only enter the workspace only upon appointment. Moreover, instead of either completely excluding from or including the clients in design processes, the clients could sit with the designers at selected moments. As a consequence, the clients made almost daily appointments and therefore frequently entered the workspace of designers. This enhanced frustrations among some of the designers:
Cleo: uhmm... I will have never, when I would have been the leader of the pro- ject, I would have never let him sit with us. Ever. I would even have been cruel. Fieldworker: why?