Page 141 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 129
rie insisted on doing the game instead of the usual user interviews. My first impression was, do we really need this? ...We cannot spend our precious time on making an amazing game if it does not help us to move a step further... The content should guide the process, not the tool. And now it feels how can be fit the content in mechanics of the tool. ... Content should be king.
In the ‘backstage’ environment of a private conversation with the field- worker, the business designer Nadia expressed her frustrations. She said that spending a lot of time on the format is not efficient, believing that good designers should prioritize developing “good content”. Her rejection of the practices of other designers becomes clear in that she labels their behavior as “cute” and questions if “it is really needed” to spend so much time on the aesthetics of the board game. In the days after, the business designer suggested that the other designers must better plan their work activities. She said: “going forward, we need to plan overtime and decide if it is relevant to spend overtime.” When we asked the crafts designer in an interview to reflect on this, she said that it was unavoidable to work over- time on the board game. “We did what we needed to do”, she proposed. Instead of reaching a compromise, the craft designers ignored the requests of the business designers to reduce the time spent on designing the game. What we see happening here is that the business designers accommodated to the preferences of craft designers. Even though Nadia did not see the benefits of working ‘overtime’ on the game, she gave the craft designers the space to train their own ‘maker’ skills and have fun while doing so.
Similar to having a discussion around what is worth spending their time on, designers also had discussions about what is not worth spending their time on. Such discussions only intensified after the acquisition by Accen- ture, as the designers worked in new domains and needed to do things they did not do before. For example, in the project we followed, the client asked the designers to do a “competitor analysis” with respect to a proposed design solution: “We miss a competitor analysis in this section. You need to know the market before you can estimate our differentiation in the marketplace.” While such requests were not uncommon, the designers were doubtful whether it belonged to their task domain. On the one hand, especially the craft designers did not want to spend time on such “corporate stuff”, on the other hand, mainly the business designers were concerned with “keeping the client satisfied”. This tension is captured in our field notes:
“Nadia asked the other designers if they worked on the competitor analy- sis. They all answered ‘no, we did not have time’. ‘Anyways’, she continued, ‘we need to work on it. Maybe you, Jane, you can see what you can do?”.