Page 92 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

80 Design Meets Business
an Amazon Echo device; and an image of a laptop for an image of a smart watch. In doing so, the designers tried to maintain authority over the final design of the Customer Journey (see Picture 5).
Not only vis a vis their audiences, but also among themselves, designers used artifacts to maintain control. Let us illustrate this turning to an empirical example of the development of Pensiopoly. The deadline of the interviews was approaching, and the team only had limited time to finish the board game. Hence, the team divided tasks among each other. Carrie, an interaction designer with well-developed drawing skills, was respon- sible for making the sketches of the board game. Joey, a visual designer, was responsible for digitalizing Carrie’s sketches and the project lead Nadia was responsible for developing interview questions that informed the structure of the game. Only when Carrie finished the sketches of the game, the rest of the designers could do their work.
Yet, Carrie spend a lot of time on developing the sketches. When the weekend was approaching, especially Nadia pressured Carrie to finish the sketches. She asked Carrie: “When do you think you can deliver the draft? We need to finish the game by Monday, and I need to know how many and what questions we need to make”. Repeatedly, Carrie answered that her sketches were not ready. Being frustrated about her dependence on Carrie, Nadia said in one of the team’s meetings that week: “Come on, do we adapt to the drawings or the drawings to us?” Afterwards, when the fieldworker asked Carrie why she took so much time developing the sketches, she explained: “It took the time it needed to take. I wanted to make sure that the game looked perfect, as I imagined it with Jane”. This empirical example shows that through physically controlling the articles that are being made, the designers could exert control over the pace of work processes and the shape of design outcomes.
Together, these observations show that material practices allowed designers to establish a sense of control in design processes. On the one hand, making artifacts helped the designers to reduce ambiguity in work processes that became fuzzier and abstract. On the other hand, making artifacts could place authority in the hands of some designers, while reducing the influence of audiences or other designers in design processes.
2.4.5. Differentiating from other occupations
Finally, making and using artifacts helped designers to differentiate from other occupations. As designers extended their remit to the domain of services and strategies, they were worried that their work overlapped with that of other service workers. In particular, they were concerned to