Page 191 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 179
To return to my introductory story about the ‘wake-up call’ of designers by the strategic director of Fjord (Chapter 1), this dissertation research sug- gests that collaborations with business have brought creatives into places they have never been before. Instead of being at the center of creativity and developing mostly finished products, now creatives also organize ex- periences for their business clients that help their business clients to be- come creative themselves (Chapter 2 & 4). As a consequence, creative oc- cupations like Service Design have attracted different people who might question what is formerly accepted as ‘common conduct’ and trigger new behaviors (Chapter 3).
While changes in work and occupations might have significant impact on how creatives do their daily job, they unfold gradually and might be hard to identify, let alone to respond to. Especially, in situations like the emergence of an occupation, it might be complicated to notice changes in work because the work itself is still highly ambiguous and it is complicated to organize collective action.
Whether it takes reflections of authority figures such as a strategic director (see Introduction), the arrival of new occupational members (Howard-Grenville et al., 2017; Chapter 3) or critical reflections from clients to realize that daily tasks and routines are changing, creatives eventually need to come to terms with it. This is the starting point of this dissertation in which I explored the question of how creatives cope with their changing work and occupations as a result of collaborating with business. In order to answer this question, I conducted qualitative research at two creative organizations, a design firm in Spain and an innovation hub in the Nether- lands. Based on my data analysis, I developed three empirical papers that each shed a different light on this question. The papers are presented in Chapter 2, 3 and 4.
Chapter 2 and 3 are based on my ethnography at the design firm Fjord. Chapter 2 explores how designers cope with their increasingly abstract work. It suggests that partly as a result of new collaborations with busi- ness, the work of designers changed from primarily developing finished products for customers to primarily developing abstract services for busi- ness. Drawing on the concept of craftsmanship, it is suggested that desig- ners hold onto former material practices instead of adapting these to the