Page 218 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

206 Design Meets Business
don’t trust them, but now you’re one of them. [laughs] At first you think you can’t make anything with your hands anymore. But you can. You make relationships. One at a time. With the same painstaking attention to craft that you knew as a maker.”
Translating between Design, Business and Technology. Closely linked to the skill of connecting is that of translating. With translating I here refer to explaining ideas, technologies or perspectives in a language that is understandable to local audiences. The aim of translating, then, is to bring together rather disparate worlds through developing a communal language. As creatives are increasingly ‘decentered’ in creative processes, it is even more important to make sure their clients understand the diverse worlds of creativity and business that they try to bring together. Let me turn to the Fjord case to further illustrate this. Here, the designers for example said: “I’m trying to create bridges between design, technology and business, by talking to the technology and to the business people. I need to make sure that each group understands each other’s perspective”. In Chapter 2, it is illustrated that the use of artifacts can be useful to trans- late between perspectives. For example, designers spend a lot of time on making their work ‘pixel-perfect’, not only because this allowed them to have fun but also because they communicated their insights to clients in this way. Because of their multi-interpretable character, artifacts could function as a sort of ‘boundary objects’ (Carlile 2002; Bechky 2003a) and allow for collaboration despite competing interpretations.
The role of the business designer. With respect to translating, it is especially interesting to further explore the role of ‘business designer’ at Fjord. In interviews, designers explained this role as “the bridge between designers and business”. Business designers themselves saw it as their responsibility to help designers identify business constraints, needs and opportunities (for example by identifying innovation strategies and exis- ting organizational structures) and vice versa help their business clients to better understand the ways in which designers worked (for example communicating the ethos, culture and expertise of designers). A business designer said: “I need to help designers understand business because they speak completely different languages”. In projects, business designers put extra efforts in making client feedback comprehensive and actionable for designers, and vice versa explaining the culture of designers to clients.
At Fjord, the role of ‘business designer’ was relatively new. When I started my fieldwork in 2016, only five business designers were working at Fjord, and when I left the field more business designers were hired. In Chapter 3 it is demonstrated how the arrival of business designers