Page 69 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 57
cult to change their daily work. They might simply not be able to let go of former material practices, which they perform as a matter of habit to perfect their craft and express their creative identity.
2.2. Theoretical Background
2.2.1. Material Practices in Design Work
Artifacts or objects “provide points of contact for people and are imbued with meaning” (Bechky 2008: 3) in and beyond organizational settings. Naturally, then, studying interactions with artifacts or what we here refer to as ‘material practices’ (Stigliani & Ravasi 2012) can be useful to create a better understanding of how designers organize action in the workplace. Most research on designers has been focused on design as a strategic capa- bility for business (e.g. Calabretta & Kleinsman 2017) or an innovation process (e.g. Kelley 2001), and hence treated artifacts as supportive for text and talk (Comi & Whyte 2018; Whyte & Harty 2012). Only recently, along with the ‘material and visual turn’ in organizational theory (Boxembaum, Meyer, Jones & Svejenova 2014), scholars gave more central attention to material practices in design studies (Ewenstein & Whyte 2009; Stigliani & Ravasi 2012; Fayard et al. 2017). Existing studies showed that designers use artifacts ‘to facilitate knowledge sharing’, ‘to stimulate creative processes’ and ‘to construct their (professional) identity’.
To start with, material practices can facilitate knowledge sharing. Studies of ‘boundary objects’ have emphasized the role that artifacts can play in sharing knowledge among diverse actors (Carlile 2002), whether these are employees of the same organization (Owen-Smith 2015) or different occupations (Bechky 2003a; 2003b). The core idea here is that artifacts are imbued with the intentions and knowledge of its creators, and hence can facilitate sensemaking processes by making abstract ideas tangible and visual (Ewenstein & Whyte 2007; Stigliani & Fayard 2010). In this vein, in their study of diverse design firms, Stigliani and Fayard (2010: 14-16) demonstrated that designers use visualization techniques to make vague information tangible and for example better communicate the needs of end-users to clients. Another example is the work of Kelley (2001), who suggests that at design firm IDEO, designers use prototypes to test their innovative ideas and perspectives with end-users. So, designers can use artifacts as boundary objects to represent, create or transform knowledge between various actors.
Further, organizational scholars showed that designers can use artifacts to stimulate creative processes. Studies that share the conception of design as a