Page 29 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 17
digital travelling experience of customers. As of today, design is even more ‘elevated’ in organizations (Micheli et al. 2018) and applied to corporate strategy making and developing stakeholder relations. Krippendorff (1997) labelled the progress of design ‘a trajectory of artificiality’, and explained that design is shifting from an emphasis of technologies to that of human considerations, from hardware to information, and from goods to services, systems and discourses. Hence, instead of a narrow focus on the product, designers adopted a broader perspective including attention for culture, system and society in which their products are embedded. Along with this, designers have shifted from the design of tactile products to the design of more abstract outcomes.
While design moved further into the domain of business, scholarly inte- rest in design changed as well. Previously, studies mainly focused on revea- ling ‘design tools’ that could be transferred from the domain of design to the domain of business and help generating new ideas (Brown 2008; 2009). Now, interest moved to explaining design as a way of thinking, a culture that can help organizations achieve competitive advantage and innovate. A famous example is the work of Brown (2009) who introduced the concept ‘design thinking’ in his work Change by Design. Later scholars defined design thinking as “a loosely structured organizational process, based on a set of tools that fostered innovation, [when there is a] need to solve abstract and multifaceted problems” (Elsbach & Stigliani 2018: 2277).
The increased demand for design in business is not a cry for aesthetics, fashion or hype, but rather can be seen as the outcome of various inter- secting trends. To start with, the business landscape is now increasingly permeated with digital technologies that create new opportunities for innovation. Digital technologies have reshaped the core of products and how business are organized. As explained before, digital technologies are products and services that are developed and implemented based on “new combinations of digital and physical components” (Yoo, Henfridsson & Lyytinen 2010: 725). Examples of digital technologies range from pervasive computing, Web 2.0 to service-oriented technology architectures (ibid: 5). In various ways, “the digital materiality enabled by pervasive digital tech- nology presents new possibilities for creating experiences, relationships, processes and organizational forms” (Yoo et al. 2012), yielding possible “wakes of innovation” (Boland et al. 2007) and offering “new possibilities for creating experiences, relationships, processes and organizational forms” (Yoo et al. 2012). Recognizing its potential, organizations have expressed the wish to go ‘digital’. A McKinsey survey (Gottlieb & Willmott 2014) showed that digital innovation is high on the agenda of executives. Yet, because digital innovations are not only new but also complex of nature,