Page 71 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 59
their values of ‘co-creation’, ‘empathy’ and ‘holism’ through performing certain material practices such as organizing collaborative workshops and developing prototypes. To better understand how “meanings and materi- ality are enacted together” in the work of designers (Orlikowski 2010: 135 in Fayard et al. 2017: 30), we approach ‘designers as craftsmen’.
2.2.2. Designers as craftsmen
Craftsmanship is an expansive concept, broadly referring to “the efforts oriented at reaching a high level of proficiency in one’s craft” (Baer & Shaw 2017: 1213). Craftsmanship is a principle insofar it refers to the pursuit of perfection, a dedication “to good work for its own sake” (Sennett 2008: 20), while being aware that such ideal might never be reached. To achieve such high standards, craftsman need to have a specific work attitude, namely a deep engagement to the work and the willingness to improve it over and over again. Jobs in which craftsmanship is highly valued, then, are often ‘projects of passion’ (Amabile 1997) because it demands the craftsmen to “falling in love again ... and again” with their work (Baer & Shaw 2017). Further, craftsmanship also implies a social consciousness, “to recognize that one’s responsibility is not only to the craft itself but to the wider commu- nity that the craft is serving” (Baer and Shaw 2017: 1214). While craftsmen can operate alone, a craft exists on the basis of a community recognizing this craft, setting the rules of the game and the fundamental beliefs that are key to it (Sennett 2008).
Commonly, craftsmen are defined as people who are engaged in manual labour. Yet, we follow Sennett (2008) in arguing that craftsmen can include a wider category of people, both inside and outside the traditional creative industries, who do create ‘things’ – (digital) products and services. Accord- ingly, craftsmen might also be professionals who make digital artifacts, such as IDEO’s designers (Fayard et al. 2017), video game developers at Ubisoft (Cohendet & Simon 2016) and Linux coders (Sennett 2008). What all craftsmen have in common is that they are closely attached to material practices in their work. In striving for the mastery of a craft, craftsmen often try to understand the materials of their work so deeply that they are not aware of how they organize their body movements, employ tools and adjust their behavior. In a way, after years of practice, material practices are enacted as a matter of habit.
Based on these explanations, we approach designers as craftsmen. Designers are not only passionate about their work, but also use need to develop particular craft skills to develop design outcomes. Seeing designers as craftsmen, makes it interesting to explore the question of how designers