Page 46 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

34 Design Meets Business
services, systems and strategies for business. Based on my own analysis and development of a project database at Fjord (see data collection below), concept strategy projects increased six-fold in two years (between 2012 – 2014). At the same time, where in 2012 around 31 projects were “detailed design”- meaning the design of finished products such as “interfaces” or “screens”- in 2015 this number was only 4. Moreover, the projects of desig- ners at Fjord became increasingly abstract.
Each project is assigned to a design team. Each team includes around six to eight designers, depending on the complexity of the project. Desig- ners fulfil different roles in projects. Key roles in teams, that are part of the standard project teams, include a service design lead, a service designer, an interaction designer, a business designer, a visual designer, and a project manager. Depending on requests from clients and other emerging needs, also a creative technologist, a content strategist, researcher or branding expert might join projects. When there are not enough designers available, or expertise moves beyond the capabilities of the available designers, free- lancers are (temporarily) included in teams. While designers have a rather clear-cut role, in practice their tasks overlap. Designers work on a full-time basis on projects, this means that visual designers can be involved both in doing user interviews and developing the visual lay out of presentations.
Typically, the projects at Fjord follow a standardized structure. As is common in design approaches, the project structure is based on the ‘double diamond model’ (Norman 2013). The double diamond model is a visual map that displays the design process as four successive phases: discover, define, develop and deliver. Fjord renamed these phases and added an extra phase to it, moving from ‘discover’ (research), ‘describe’ (analyze), ‘design’ (develop solutions), ‘refine’ (iterate solutions) to ‘realize’ (implement solu- tions). Most projects target the ‘fuzzy front-end’ and run from ‘discover’ to ‘design’. Each phase is associated with specific deliverables. For example, the end of the research phase is marked with an insight report and the start of the describe phase often starts with a co-creation workshop called ‘Ramble’. To achieve these intermediate design deliverables, the designers make use of design tools. These design tools are often standardized but the content, lay-out and shape varies per project. For example, in each project, the designers make a ‘customer journey’, a design tool used to display a customer experience chronologically, from the first moment of asking for the organization’s service to actually receiving it. Yet, whether the customer journey is visualized on a poster or visualized in a 3D-object, depends on the decisions made by the design team.
During my data collection I followed several projects. The most inten- sive data collection was done during my participation in the Pensio project,