Page 72 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

60 Design Meets Business
cope with changing material practices, which previously were central to their work processes and professional identity. To further investigate this, we did an in-depth field study of designers at service design firm Fjord.
2.3. Methods
2.3.1. Research setting: design firm Fjord
For this study, we selected the design firm Fjord. The first author conducted a 17 months ethnography in one of Fjord’s design studios in Madrid. Fjord was founded in 2006. Fjord has clients worldwide and is ranked among the world’s best design agencies (Kolko 2015). At Fjord, designers help their business clients to improve their customer services by developing solutions from a human-centered perspective: “instead of business needs and technical constraints, we put the users’ insights at the center of what we do”, a designer explained. Their design projects covered broad array of questions (such as: ‘how can we help citizens retire safely?’ to ‘how can we improve the shopping experience of our customers?’) and target diverse industries, among others education, financial services, retail and telecommunications. On average Fjord conducts between 30 and 40 projects a year both nationally and internationally.
At Fjord, each project is conducted by a team of four to six designers. Typically, each project follows a similar approach that is derived from the double-diamond approach that is typical to design work (Norman 2013). The double-diamond approach structures the design process into various phases, and is grounded in the idea that in all innovation processes a combi- nation of divergent and convergent thinking is needed. At Fjord, this means that in the first phase, designers conduct research and explore the design problem (‘Discover’). In the second phase, the designers elaborate on this research and identify design opportunities (‘Describe’), after which they select and develop a concept (‘Design’). In the final phase, the designers build and iterate the prototype of the concept developed in the previous phase (‘Realize’), and in some cases bring it to the market (‘Implement’). In each of these phases, Fjord uses tools that are typical to design thinking processes such as conducting user interviews (in the Discover phase), the organization of collaborative workshops (in the Describe phase) and the development of a service blueprint (in the Design phase).
In recent years, the work of designers at Fjord changed. Fjord was founded as a digital design firm specialized in the creative, strategic, and technical development of screen-based products and services. While the aesthetics of design were always considered important, the designers