Page 83 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 71
In drawing a comparison between “pixels” and “families”, the design director highlights that designers do not only love their job, but also take it very personal. Another designer explained that taking their job “personal” is key to reaching high standards and achieving success:
This is not a job for us. ... We all take our jobs so personal. (...) Because, even though we work in a company like this, this [design work] is not about money. (...) it is about looking for success and doing your thing well. We take our craft super serious.
This fragment suggests that while design work takes place in a corpo- rate environment, focused on making ‘money’, design is more than a value transaction. The designer here proposes that it is a craft that designers take ‘super serious’. Indeed, the fieldworker observed that designers often voluntarily worked overtime to make their designs “pixel perfect”.
What further highlights the intimate connection with the designers and their work is that designers often felt emotional at work. For example, during her data collection, the fieldworker saw a designer bursting out into tears after a client presentation. A few days later one of the designers reflected on this: “she was exhausted and desperate almost, she put too much of herself into it”. Usually, however, the atmosphere among the designers was energetic and positive. In their interactions with each other, the designers laughed a lot and praised each other’s work. Good news, such as compliments of clients or the market launch of a design solution, was celebrated with a round of applause in organizational meetings.
It is not a surprise, then, that designers were frustrated about their increasingly abstract work in which there was no direct need to design “something”. In particular, designers mentioned that they felt “boredom”, “stress” and “anger” when there was not an opportunity for them to make artifacts, like “screens”. This is illustrated in the following interview fragment:
Designer: I remember... yeah, it’s more than one year that I don’t do screens. Fieldworker: Oh, really?
Designer: Yeah. I’m just doing this quick sketching, just to give the client an impression of what it could be, but it’s not real design. Increasingly, we do service design, and we don’t anymore learn how to make screens. [...] I miss it [making screens].
3 Names have been altered for anonymity purposes