Page 196 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

184 Design Meets Business
their words, “normal consultants” and especially from Accenture consul- tants who are involved in similar domains of work. Making prototypes such as ‘a digital robot advisor’ allowed the designers to express their expertise while at the same time, setting themselves apart as an occupational group.
Taken together, this study shows that using the lens of craftsmanship, helps to understand that designers do not only use artifacts instrumentally in their work – for example to inspire novel ideas – but also as a matter of habit, because designers material practices are intertwined with their own craft identity. Further, this study shows that designers cannot simply adjust their skills and work processes to fit the new situation. Even though the nature of design work is changing, the designers continue to perform former work processes. Continuing what they previously did helps them to be more connected to their craft and guarantee a sense of stability in their highly changing work.
5.1.2. Discovering the occupational mandate in intra- occupational struggles
Chapter 3 elaborates on Chapter 2, and is set at the design firm Fjord. It explores the changing work domain of designers from an occupational perspective. Occupational studies suggest that when occupations change, they might attract newcomers with different beliefs (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017). At the same time, it is argued that for emerging occupations to flourish, it is important develop common ground and create an occu- pational mandate (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017). This chapter explores the question of how members of the emergent and changing occu- pation Service Design develop an occupational mandate.
Service Design is an emergent occupation, only becoming a paid job in the late 1990s. Service Design grew out of other design practices that were primarily focused on developing finished products, like product design or interaction design. Especially when the popularity of design in business increased, the end product of design shifted from making tangi- bles to making intangibles. Especially around 2013, designers increasingly developed strategies and other abstract outcomes for business. As a conse- quence, the occupation Service Design attracted especially people with a background in business and management. Moreover, Service Design is not only an emergent occupation but also a changing occupation with an increasingly heterogeneous occupational membership.
At Fjord, this meant that design projects included both newcomers, often people with a background in business (‘business designers’), and longer serving workers, often people with a background in traditional