Page 76 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

64 Design Meets Business
events that seemed to repeat themselves (such as ‘working overtime on the development of artifacts’) and overall seemed interesting because they either contrasted with her expectations or experiences (see the work of Schultze 2001) (for example ‘making artifacts for their own delight instead of showing it for legitimacy to clients’). In total, we collected 382 typed pages of fieldnotes and 8 handwritten notebooks.
Doing semi-structured interviews with diverse actors. The data collection also included semi-structured interviews. The interviews were complementary to ethnographic experiences, and helped us developed a more ‘polyvocal account’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 15) of our data collec- tion. While most of the interviews were done by the fieldworker, the other authors of this paper also conducted interviews. Especially in the first round of fieldwork, the fieldworker did explorative interviews, asking the designers more general questions. Such questions included, for example: ‘how the work of designers changed over time, especially since the acqui- sition by Accenture’, ‘what new roles and functions emerged at Fjord over time?’ , ‘what projects are designers involved in’ and ‘what are key chal- lenges in projects’. Especially in round two and three of our data collection, we conducted more targeted interviews with the members of the design project in which the fieldworker participated. These interviews were done with designers, clients and the Accenture consultants. The purpose of these interviews was to uncover people’s reflections on events that the fieldworker witnessed in the field, add explanations to their actions and illuminate events that they considered important but were underempha- sized by the fieldworker. For example, in an interview with the project lead, the latter highlighted that she was surprised that the other designers in the design team gave priority to developing board games over developing strong content in design processes.
In total the fieldworker conducted 67 interviews with 36 informants, among which Fjord designers, clients, Accenture consultants and others (such as freelancers) (see Table 2.2. & 2.3.). In particular, during the field- worker’s participation in the project, she did 13 interviews with designers and 8 interviews with clients and Accenture consultants. Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and 180 minutes, and was transcribed with the help of student assistants. Some of the informants we interviewed multiple times, such as those involved in the design project that the fieldworker followed. This helped her not only to establish ‘rapport’ (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) but also to ask more detailed information about for example the artifacts they used.
Making a project database and gathering documents. Finally, we also collected archival data. Based on the available data in Fjord’s archives,