Page 32 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

20 Design Meets Business
adhering to principles including ‘co-creation’, ‘empathy’ and ‘holism’. They show that Service Designers practice these principles in their own work practices, which vary from doing ‘user interviews’ and ‘organizing collabo- rative workshops’. So even when the definition of Service Design is rather broad and can be conflated with other service work, Service Design can be distinguished as a separate occupation in its usage of specific design tools, practices and the belief in a specific ethos.
The popularity of design in business, and in particular service design, is visible in the organizational landscape. Collaborations between desig- ners and companies are more and more common. For example, the CEO of Intercorp, one of Peru’s biggest corporations, collaborated with the design firm IDEO in 2010 to make affordable education for middle class fami- lies possible. Also, an increasing amount of companies collaborate with designers to develop a design-centric culture and develop design capabili- ties (Kolko 2015; Elsbach & Stigliani 208). For example, IBM invested 100 million and hired 2000 designers in 2016. Similarly, Uber’s design team has grown seventy times since 2012 and diverse companies, ranging from 3M to Apple Inc., have appointed designers to senior executive roles adopting, for example, the title of a Chief Design Officer. Mark Curtis, co-founder of Fjord said in an interview on the popular technology blog Wired (2012): “The integration of the CDO role into the boardroom is indicative of a greater shift across the corporate landscape, one that has greater reverence and places increasing importance on the role of the designer into the top line strategy of the business”.
The pursuit of design is not limited to established brand-name compa- nies like IBM and Apple Inc. Especially from 2013 on, there has been a wave of acquisitions of design agencies by strategy and management consultancy firms (D’Emidio et al. 2015; Kolko 2015). Since 2004, over seventy design agencies have been acquired by companies as diverse as Adobe, Google and New York Times. More than half (71%) of these acquisitions have been done in the last three years, since 2015 (Maeda 2017). Especially professional service firms, such as Accenture, BCG, Deloitte, PWC, Ernst & Young and McKinsey, displayed their interest in design firms. In 2013, the first management consultancy to acquire a design firm was Accenture when they bought design and innovation consultancy Fjord – the company that is at the center of this dissertation research. About this, Olof Schybergson, co-founder of Fjord, said in an interview on a popular blog (Medium 2017): “Going direct to consumers is a big disruptor ... There are new opportu- nities to gather data and insights about consumer behaviors, [their] likes, [and their] dislikes”. So, he highlighted that the sensitivity for customers’ demands is fundamental to the success of design in business.