Page 49 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 37
spend a lot of time socializing with each other. Hence, it was useful to join social events, such as after work ‘cañas’ (beers), group lunches and coffee talk. Even though the key aim of attending these events was not collecting data, it helped me to create a better understanding of their work and smoo- then my process of ‘resocialization’ at Fjord. In particular it helped me to better understand subtle clues, implicit assumptions and taboos among designers. In line with Schultze’s (2000) work on writing confessional accounts, I took note of situations that surprised me or ran counter to my expectations and took my own personal experiences as a key starting point. Mostly, I captured my observations in my notebook. I tried to jot down what I saw and experiences as fast as possible, making pictures of what I observed if this appeared handy. Also, I often caught myself recording voice messages, writing insights down on napkins (during ‘dinners’), and sending text messages to myself. I tried to work with whatever was at hand. When I returned ‘from the field’, I typed out my field notes on my laptop in an online document to which my supervisors also had access. In the first three months of my fieldwork, I typed a total of 120 pages of fieldnotes, and wrote 4 notebooks full (by hand).
Also, I collected documents and other archival data, among which was information about projects that Fjord undertook. In particular, based on the available data in Fjord’s archives, I developed a project database in which I included all the projects Fjord completed since 2011 (as there was only data available on project from this moment on). I categorized the projects on the basis of: type of project, client, industry, roles involved, and whether the project came in via Accenture or not. Developing the table helped me understand better how the nature of the work of desig- ners changed over time. In the beginning of July 2016, my first round of fieldwork came to an end. At this point, I remember one of my supervisors saying that I was defending the work of designers and taking over their language. Even though intermediary meetings with my supervisors helped me to ‘jump out’ of the field, I was immersed in my process of ‘resocializa- tion’ and I risked ‘going native’ (Bryman (2016 [1995]): 294). It was time to take some distance from the field.
Diving deeper as ‘observer as participant’. Only one month after settling back in the Netherlands, I received a call from the Fjord studio. The design director asked me whether I was interested in participating in a project with a client in the Netherlands. I smiled out of excitement. I saw this as an opportunity for me to adopt a more participatory role. A few months later, I joined a design team in the role of ‘design researcher’. This was the start of my second round of fieldwork, which took place between September 14th 2016, and lasted until the end of August 2017. In this