Page 67 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 55
ways when making furniture. Similarly, scholars have acknowledged the possibility that the material practices of designers are “intrinsically inter- twined” with their values (Fayard et al. 2017: 29). In other words, designers closely attach ‘what they do’ to ‘who they are’ as an occupational group. Hence, just like craftsmen, designers might use artifacts not only as instru- ments to support other processes but also simply because they are so accus- tomed to use these artifacts.
In the past decades, however, the work of designers has been rapidly changing and designers are encouraged to alter their material practices. Due to, among others, the emergence of new technologies and a height- ened business interest in design (Mager 2004; Calabretta & Kleinsmann 2017), the work of designers has been expanding from the design of tangi- bles to the design of intangibles. Whereas design as first and foremost preoccupied with the design of experimental prototypes (like ‘Pensiopoly’) or finished products (such as buildings (Boland & Collopy 2004) or kitchen appliances (Ravasi, Rindova & Stigliani 2018), increasingly designers have been designing services for business, including customer experi- ences, organizational transformation and innovation strategies (Stigliani & Fayard 2010; Fayard, Stigliani & Bechky 2017). Moreover, the ‘designed artefact’ has become increasingly abstract (Krippendorff 1997). As a conse- quence of this, the work processes of designers have become increasingly “intangible, fluid, and essentially subjective, and this is difficult to define and design” (Stigliani & Fayard 2010: 2).
So, these observations suggest that, on the one hand, designers are craftsmen and hence entwined with their material practices and, on the other hand, designers experience significant changes in material prac- tices at work. This propels the question: What happens when designers have to, in the spirit of Weick (1996), ‘drop their tools’? If material prac- tices are indeed entwined with the ethos of designers (Fayard, Stigliani & Bechky 2017), changing material practices is likely to alter the ways in which designers value their work and construct their professional identity. Following the call for a better understanding of the material practices of designers (Stigliani & Ravasi 2012; Elsbach & Stigliani 2018) and organizing work in today’s rapidly changing environment (Barley & Bechky 2017), in this paper we explore the following research question: how do designers as craftsmen cope with changing material practices at work?
For this study, the first author carried out an ethnography at the design firm Fjord. Fjord offers a suitable setting for multiple reasons. To begin with, material practices are central in the work of Fjord’s designers. Just like other designers, they organize collaborative workshops, make proto- types and use materials to progress their design processes (Ewenstein