Page 79 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 67
of designers were changing significantly. The designers talked about the impact of the acquisition on the nature of projects they were doing: “instead of developing screens, we now develop strategies”. To further understand this, the fieldworker read and reread her field notes and narratives. She found fragmented empirical data that indicated that the work was becoming more abstract. To gain more focus in her analysis and better understand the responses of designers to changing work practices, she shifted her focus to especially the project data, especially her field notes, the transcripts of interviews and the narratives. First, the fieldworker listed all artifacts that were used or made in the project, and the material practices surrounding these artifacts. An emerging insight was that designers sought opportuni- ties to make and use artifacts, even though the context was not suitable for it (e.g. upcoming deadlines). This was something the fieldworker already observed in the field, as is evidenced by the following memo:
Cleary there is a tension going on. On the one hand, the designers complain their work is becoming more abstract, messy and open-ended. On the other hand, they are trained to make the abstract concrete and present them- selves as experts in creating structure out of chaos. The consequence of this, seems to be, that some ‘Fjordians’ [Fjord designers], especially those who are longer employed at Fjord, are very much focused on tools: how the Customer Journey looks like, and how this affects the way they shape their findings; how Pensiopoly is shaped, and how this game impacts their findings; how Mural is shaped and allows for client interaction. There are various tools that they consider important, even a priority in moving design processes forward. It seems that they bring in tangibility and in a sense stabilization in their work by prioritizing tools (process: structure, form) over information (content matter).
Comparing the development artifacts. The next step was to compare the use and creation of artifacts (see for a selection of the artifacts Table 2.3). A first step in comparing these artifacts was writing a narrative about the development of the artifact from beginning to end. Then, especially drawing on complementary fieldnotes and interviews, the fieldworker analyzed when the designers develop artifacts. We found that designers made artifacts especially when they considered their work ‘boring’ or ‘stressful’. In particular, it was interesting to discover that designers made artifacts in situations that did not directly demand them to do so – for example because of high time pressure or because there was not a request from clients to do so. Intrigued by these findings, we explored why the designers made and used artifacts. In particular we found that making