Page 91 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 79
What is interesting here is not only that designers increasingly do activities that are associated with ‘business practices - like interviewing, writing analyses and making reports – but also that designers making things tangible helped the designers to “think in action” (Schein, 1973).
Besides gaining clarity in ambiguous and abstract design processes, making artifacts helped the designers to keep control over design processes vis a vis their clients. As the number of stakeholders increased in design projects while for the designers it was important to adhere to the principle of ‘co-creation’ (Fayard et al. 2017), the designers sought ways to maintain their influential position in design processes. Let us turn to the develop- ment of the Customer Journey to illustrate this. In the first presentation of the Customer Journey, the clients asked the designers to include more innovative technologies in their illustrations. The designers did not agree with the feedback, which is exemplified with the following fragment of field notes that is made during a project meeting:
Nadia said: ‘it could be that for them [clients] it is not innovative because the concepts are not new. We have been validating the concepts with them on the way. We did not come up with something new, that is it. Do not wor- ry too much about it’. Carrie stepped into the discussion and said: ‘yes I do worry’, while looking at her computer screen on which the illustrations that she made are displayed. While the other designers kept on talking about what the client meant with “innovative”, Carrie said: ‘well, we do not have time to change it anymore. We decided to offer a human service and not a digital one. We cannot change all the illustrations anymore’.
This example shows that on the one hand the designers realize that they need to accommodate to the needs of clients - through including more illustrations of ‘innovative technologies’ in their designs - and on the other hand the fragment shows that designers fear losing authority over their own designs - which is illustrated by comments like “we decided to offer a human service and not a digital one”.
In the days after, the clients kept on pressuring for more visualizations of “new technologies” in the Customer Journey. This time the designers sought extra support from the Accenture consultant involved in the project. Yet, the consultant pressured the designers to listen to the demands of clients. Based on this, the designers decided to adapt their illustrations of the Customer Journey. Yet, rather than changing all the illustrations, they changed only some of their illustrations. For example, they changed some illustrations of an iPhone for an illustration of a woman talking to