Page 216 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

204 Design Meets Business
(Chapter 3), work with different audiences and clients (Chapter 2, 3 & 4). Especially drawing on my ethnography at Fjord, below I suggest that for creatives it is might be useful to adapt their roles, skills and overall ‘design attitude’ (Boland & Collopy 2004; Michlewski 2016).
Adopting more diverse roles in creative projects. Firstly, this disser- tation research suggests that as the nature of creative work is changing, the roles of creatives have changed along. Chapter 2 shows that for designers it is no longer sufficient to merely adopt a traditional design role, such as an inte- raction designer or a product designer. Increasingly, they need to act like a facilitator or coach, helping their clients to think from a user-centered pers- pective. “We are actually a sort of shaman, guiding people through transfor- mation”, the strategic director of Fjord once told me during a conversation. Especially since Fjord was acquired by Accenture, the designers worked on large strategy projects and were sometimes required to perform activities they previously associated with business, such as offering strategic advice to management or doing competitive analysis.
Chapter 4 also suggests that creatives engage in different activities and adopt more diverse roles. This chapter is an extreme example of how crea- tives need to develop the skill to continuously change their role, tasks and involvement in projects. For example, depending on their clients’ needs, Waag Society’s creatives fluidly moved between the roles of researcher, facilitator, technology expert, and innovator. Moreover, this dissertation highlights that for creatives it might no longer be sufficient to hold onto the role of the ‘artist’ or typical ‘craftsmen’, but they need to extend their roles and activities to domains previously associated with other work domains such as business, research, marketing and facilitation.
Connecting Diverse Stakeholders and Technologies. As crea- tives shift between roles in various domains, they broaden and transform their own skills. In this dissertation research, it appears that for creatives it is especially important to train skills of ‘connecting’ and ‘translating’. Connecting refers to the ability to bring together disparate people, techno- logies and tools, something that scholars earlier referred to as ‘brokerage’ (e.g. Hargadon & Sutton 1997; Lingo & O’Mahony 2010; Obstfeld et al. 2014). For example, Chapter 3 shows that for designers it is important to connect the perspectives of their business clients with the needs of users, to act as ‘guardians of user needs’ - as one of the designers said in an inter- view- or as input for innovation (Parmentier & Mangematin 2014). In the field, the designers put efforts in connecting perspectives through using typical design thinking tools like ‘Customer Journeys’, ‘Personas’ or ‘User Interviews’. Besides connecting their clients to user needs, designers also facilitated new connections between clients and their stakeholders. In