Page 44 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

32 Design Meets Business
My ethnography at Fjord was phenomenon driven, triggered by the flourishing interest in design in business especially since 2013, and more generally by the emergence of the occupation Service Design since late 1990s. Fjord is a top-tier service design and innovation consultancy (Maeda 2017), specialized in developing customer experiences through designing digital products and services. Fjord opened its doors in 2001 and was globally acquired in 2013 by the well-established management consultancy Accenture. In popular media, the take-over of Fjord is described as the start of a wave of acquisitions of design firms by management consultancies (Kolko 2015). In 2017, when I left the field, Fjord had 28 studios in places like Helsinki, New York and Sao Paulo, with a headcount of 800 emplo- yees in total.
My fieldwork took place in one of the Fjord’s studios in Madrid, Spain. At the time of data collection, around 40 designers worked here. Besides the designers, Fjord employed around 15 other staff members in manage- ment functions. The studio was located in the city center of Madrid, around 2 kilometres from the Accenture offices that were located in the business district of the Spanish capital. The designers described the Madrid studio as an ‘adult’ studio compared to other Fjord studios. They argued that the Madrid studio was not only one of the first studios to open its doors, but also it was successfully operating for more than a decade and guiding the opening of ‘satellite’ studios, in among others Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Sao Paulo and Istanbul.
The Madrid studio is a welcoming environment. There is a constant buzz of people talking, laughing and walking around. It looks similar to work spaces in creative hubs. With open-plan spaces, shared work desks and visual objects, it breathes an air of creativity. The studio is divided in various sub-spaces, in which each design team works on a project. The separate spaces are physically marked a collection of desks and large white- board walls that are covered in posters, illustrations and texts. In their own project space, it happens often that designers stand up, walk around and sit behind each other’s desk to do collaborative work. Another impor- tant area in the studio is ‘the Kitchen’. This common area includes a large table, the coffee machine, fridge and even a corner where an Xbox is insta- lled for play during lunch time. In the Kitchen, important organizational meetings are organized like the weekly Breakfast meeting in which project updates are discussed. Next to the Kitchen, is the printing area, another frequented space for the designers. Here, they print their design concepts such as the large posters on which for example ‘the customer journey’ are designed. The designers are not always in working in their studio. Espe- cially since the acquisition by Accenture, the designers worked more often