Page 51 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 39
In an attempt to move beyond my own perspective, and especially to get a better sense of what designers considered significant, I also conducted interviews. Mostly, I asked the designers to reflect on their experiences in the project. I asked them to zoom in on challenges and zoom out on how they resolved these, and how this impacted the entire project. Also, I conducted interviews to capture data during moments I was not present in the field, for example when multiple designers were on the road doing user interview, only some of which I was able to join. Similarly, I asked Accen- ture consultants and clients to reflect on their experiences working with the designers in the project. I conducted some of these interviews jointly with my supervisors, which helped me distance myself from my own inter- pretations of what happened in the field.
While the project progressed, I also collected archival data. In total I collected 55 ‘internal documents’ like the project proposal, presentations, and informative email-threads. Further, I frequently turned to the project notes, which were saved in an Evernote folder and consisted in total of 357 notes. These notes included summaries of telephone conversations with clients, notes of project meetings, content for design deliverables and other sources of knowledge. Finally, also the documents in the shared online ‘Box’-folder of the designers was useful to gather data. Here, they saved copies of final deliverables, photos of their work activities, illustrations for design solutions, among others. This folder contained over 2500 files.
In September 2017, when I did the last interviews with designers and clients, I felt that my data collection could continue forever. Can one ever learn enough about an occupation that is still emerging and work that is rapidly changing? Yet, in reality I needed to return to my teaching duties and start writing the final two papers for this dissertation. I agree with Barley (2000[1983]: 189) who proposes that “finishing fieldwork is always a matter of definition, not of fact”.
1.7.4. Data analysis at Fjord
In ethnography, the data collection occurs congruently with processes of analysing data (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007). My data analysis has been done on the basis of grounded theory techniques (Strauss & Corbin 1990). My inductive approach included different elements, which are presented separately but were often overlapping in practice.
Writing empirical narratives. Where to start when analyzing so much data? In total, I conducted 67 interviews (79.2 hrs. recorded time), 77 observations of events and countless other observations (yielding to 382 typed field pages and 8 fully written notebooks) and 439 documents. Not