Page 227 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 215
agree. Vice versa, when my informants were happy and relaxed, they felt connected with their work and sensed it was moving into the right direc- tion. Closely relating to my informants and connecting to their emotions, moreover, helped me to gather more detailed and nuanced data.
Second, embrace uncertainty. Another challenge of doing ethno- graphy, is that not only you feel uncertain, but also your informants are likely to feel uncertain. Human behavior is complex. People might do things that are irrational. People might contradict themselves. Say one thing and do another thing. While your informants can help you naviga- ting through their lives, this does not mean they give you clarity. Often- times people do not know that they do certain things, let alone why so. For example, while people in organizations might be convinced that innovative ideas are born during strategy meetings, they often emerge in informal talks while sharing a cup of coffee. Hence, as an ethnographer I had to become comfortable with my informants ‘not knowing’, or at least ‘not knowing it all’. In my own research I might have even encountered more unclarity around work practices since I studied an emergent occu- pation and its members often among themselves did not agree what are core practices (Chapter 3). In order to lean into the ambiguity of doing field research, I started to capture as much data as was revealed to me, which brings me to the next point.
Third, engage in butterfly-collecting. When I started my field- work, design was a popular topic of discussion in. Practitioner journals like Harvard Business Review or New York Times announced the rise of design in the domain of business. Design journals and blogs warned for the implications of collaborating with business and reflected on the profes- sionalization of design. While such resources are interesting, they did not reveal the intimacies that I was looking for. The intimacies that allow me to get a ‘real’ understanding of what was going on and theorize upon my return from the field. Especially through reading the work of Nigel Barley (1983) with the amusing title ‘The Innocent Anthropologist’, I learned that developing sensitive knowledge does not happen at once. So, in order to get started, I engaged in butterfly-collecting data, something I define as noting down first - and often rather incoherent - impressions of my own observations. Such impressions included details about how the designers dress, their routines, their language, communication with audiences, their billing systems and their ideals. I achieved this, amongst others, by ‘stra- tegically hanging around’ (Watson 2013) in the design studio and parti- cipating in gatherings whenever possible. Only after several months, and especially when I participated in a design project for a longitudinal period, my data became more focused. Moreover, even though the designers were