Page 47 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 35
a collaboration between Fjord and the client organization Pensio1. This project lasted about seven months, between September 2016 and April 2017. The project came to Fjord via Accenture, and was part of a larger stra- tegic alliance between Accenture and Pensio. Pensio is among the largest Dutch financial services providers, offering services like executive consul- tancy, asset management, pension administration, pension communica- tion and employers services. When Pensio approached Fjord, partly due to the emergence of digital technologies, the Dutch pension system was shifting from a highly regulated market to a more open market in which employees can independently choose their own pension fund product instead of arranging it via their employer. For pension funds, this means that their customer base is changing from primarily employers to emplo- yees. Another motivation of the project was that the Dutch population is aging and there is not sufficient money to offer everyone their complete pension. Hence, employees need additional products and services to ensure sufficient income for later.
In the Pensio project, the design team comprised of, on average, seven members. Although the composition of team members shifted along the project, key roles included: a service design lead (project lead), a business design, an interaction designer, a service designer, a visual designer, resear- cher (me) and a project manager. While the ‘home base’ of the designers was in their studio in Madrid, they often travelled to the Netherlands and stayed there for days, sometimes weeks, in order to give presentations or conduct user research.
1.7.3. Data collection at Fjord
At Fjord, I collected ethnographic data between March 2016 and August 2017. While doing fieldwork can be organized, it cannot be planned. In order to stay close to the messiness of doing ethnography, below I tell the story of my data collection at Fjord. Broadly speaking, in my research I moved from a more observatory role - ‘participant as observer’ role - to a more participa- tory role - the ‘observer as participant’ (Lofland & Lofland 1999).
Creating familiarity as ‘participant observer’. In the first round of fieldwork, between the 22nd of March 2016 and the 2nd of July 2016, I adopted a ‘participant as observer’ role. For over three months, I followed the designers in their daily activities, both during and after work hours. All
1 For purposes of anonymity, the name of client organization is changed along this dissertation research.