Page 65 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 53
2.1. Introduction
In the Spring of 2016, the first author [hereafter: fieldworker] had an early morning meeting with the design team in which she participated as part of her fieldwork. In the previous weeks, the team members spent most of their time on doing ‘user’ interviews, developing textual documents and having conversations with a pension company who was their client. The de- signers considered this period ‘stressful’ and ‘boring’, and were frustrated particularly because they could not practice their design skills.
When the designers had the opportunity to do a second round of user research, they decided to create a new design tool for doing group inter- views. Instead of making interview guides as usual, they developed “Pensi- opoly”. Pensiopoly was a prototype of a board game that strongly resem- bled Monopoly. Day in and day out, they sketched, digitalized, iterated, and printed their designs. They also spent hours discussing ‘how the game should look like’ and ‘how to make it user friendly’. This surprised the field- worker because the designers never developed a board game before and were working under a tight deadline.
Right before that morning’s meeting took place, the team showed the final prototype of Pensiopoly to the other designers in the studio. Within several minutes, the team’s dedicated work area was crowded. Pensiopoly was admired by the other designers and the team was complimented for its ‘good work’. For the remaining part of the project, the other designers referred to the team as ‘Pensiopoly’ instead of by the name of the client organization which was commonly used.
These observations show that ‘material practices’ are key in the work of designers. Organizational scholars have explained material practices as recurrent patterns of action oriented at collecting, creating, changing or using artifacts (Rafaeli & Pratt 2006; Stigliani & Ravasi 2012), physical or
2 The term ‘user’ refers to those for whom the designers design the product or service. Users might include the client organization itself, (potential) customers of clients, partners of clients and other stakeholders related to the emerging design problem and solution.