Page 93 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 81
be conflated with “normal consultants” like “the Accenturians”, as some designers jokingly referred to the Accenture consultants. This becomes clear in the following quote of the strategy director of Fjord:
[Designers become] more and more like management consultants from the 1980s. We do less and less of our own research, draw big conclusions, risk getting caught up in our own abstractions, and lose the connection with the ‘real’ world. What do we design now?
Indeed, there were various occasions in the field in which the designers emphasized the need to draw distinctions between themselves and management consultants, and especially Accenture consultants. See for example this empirical illustration:
Cleo, business designer, says ‘we [designers] need to get them [clients] un- derstand who we are and why we are here’. Paul responded: ‘yes, the guys who run around with Post-its’. Nadia joined the conversation: ‘we need to ask them [clients] to trust the process. We have a proven method. Can you maybe show best practices in the kick off?’, she asked while looking
Picture 2.7 Staging the performance of design work