Page 140 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

128 Design Meets Business
for this project I wanted to do a different style.
Joe: maybe you can try a different style later, we do not have time now
This fragment shows that Carrie, a craft designer, wants to experi- ment with a different design style. The other designers, both with a back- ground in business and more craft-related disciplines, encourage her to “try a different style later” and “sketch [the illustrations] in less detail”. They highlight that their work is interdependent and in order to move the design project forward, Carrie’s input is needed to move the design project forward. The designers reach a compromise: sketching the drawings “in less detail” and not “experimenting with a new style”. In the days after, Carrie used elements of drawings that she developed in earlier projects and re-contextu- alized them in the current design project through making ‘simple’ changes.
Often, discussions between designers around organizing time were around spending time on ‘form’ versus ‘function’ of design: “[We] make things more beautiful, and more understandable or usable. ... Form and function are equally important”. For multiple designers, it was not always clear how these two elements must be balanced in design processes. Along with our fieldwork, it frequently happened that craft designers spend more time on ‘form’, while business designers spend more time on ‘function’. Spending time on form, or the way design solutions look, helped the craft designers not only to express their signature style (Elsbach 2007) but also to improve their design skills (see Chapter 2). This is exemplified not only in the previous empirical illustration in which Carrie wanted to spend her time on experimenting with a new style of drawing for the Customer Journey but also by turning to discussions around ‘Making Pensiopoly’. Pensiopoly was a board game that the designers developed to do group interviews with users. Even though the designers faced tight deadlines and making the game was not a client request, a significant proportion of the design team worked day and day out on making the game. A newly hired service designer and an experienced craft designer worked long days on making the sketches, the illustrations, and other artifacts related to the game. Several days, these designers even worked “overtime”. Repeatedly, the project lead expressed her concerns about the relevance of spending so much time on developing a board game. She told the fieldworker in one of their talks:
I lean more towards efficiency and was very skeptical about the game. It took more than a week to develop the game, and we are not sure if it indeed gives us the answers we need. ... Let me think how I can put this without sounding too critical or offending anyone. Ok, it is ‘cute’ and I am always critical to- wards ‘cute’. It has to serve a purpose. Our role is to gather information. Car-