Page 145 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 133
category of ‘clients’. Especially since their work changed to designing strat- egies and affected a broader audience than only the direct clients them- selves, such unclarities enhanced. In various projects, we saw that clients highlighted the importance of involving the wider “project team” and other key members of the organization. This, in turn, led to discussions among designers about if it is indeed the responsibility of designers to include such wide scope of people in their projects:
Lara: Richard send the Mural [online co-creation activity] to all the Ram- ble participants, and they have been filling it in in the weekend. We told him we would send such activities 1 or 2 a month”.
Nadia: Yeah, it is important to do it. But none of these activities have to take us away from what we are doing. He wanted us to create content, and service design, and I said no we cannot create content and educate these people. Carrie: I do not understand why we have to do it at all.
Joe: “I think Richard wants us to work with Mario [one of the brand man- agers in project team]. But that is not our job. I think we need to start sep- arating ourselves from all the politics behind the project.”
Nadia: This can help us to promote our project and create impact [inside the organization]. Let’s keep that in mind.
This fragment shows that not all designers consider it their respon- sibility to include actors beyond their direct clients. Especially Nadia, a business designer, highlights the importance of creating an impact on the organization. Ultimately, the designers created a new activity on ‘Mural’ and shared these with the project team. Moreover, this section shows that while all designers agree on the importance to include others in their work, among themselves there are different approaches in terms of how this can best be done. Such discussions are anchored in wider debates about who is the key audience of design work. We see here that as their work is changing towards developing business strategies, the designers frequently choose for clients instead of end-users and their ultimate audience.
3.5. Discussion
Our ethnography of Service Design at a design firm suggests that for members of fledgling occupations it might be difficult to all look into the same direction, thereby emphasizing heterogeneity inside occupa- tions (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017). This adds to the literature which has mostly concentrated on how members of an emergent occupation leverage commonalities - such as culture, identity, and values - vis a vis other occu-