Page 94 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

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Design Meets Business
at Paul, the project’s visual designer. Paul answers: ‘Yes but it is not sell- ing the presentation. You do not need the examples to sell us, but more to show examples of our case studies’. Cleo agreed with Paul: ‘one thing is that the project is sold already, but a lot of people in the room need to trust us’. Nadia responded: ‘yes but we need to show it visually... this is what we do’.
This fragment shows that even though the project was officially “sold”, the designers still somehow felt the need to “sell” themselves as an occupa- tional group and win the trust of their clients. In interviews, the designers explained that they felt the need to win the trust of their clients because their clients never worked with designers before. In particular, the designers told us that their clients are used to work with more traditional management consultancies like “the McKinsey” or “Accenturians” who have different methods and approaches to the development of services. The designers tried to differentiate themselves from other service consultancies through their material practices, which already becomes evident in comments like “the guys who run around with Post-Its”. Interestingly, in our interviews with business clients of Fjord, it became clear that clients often want to collaborate with designers because of their ability to make things tangible and their creative approaches to the development of services. Moreover, their material practices could help the designers to differentiate themselves from other occupations and to gain legitimacy from their audiences. Let us turn to an empirical example to further illustrate this.
At the end of the project in which the fieldworker participated, the designers presented their design solution to the client. The solution was a mobile chat application for financial advice. The designers explained it as a sort of “robot advisor” and called it ‘SAM’. They demonstrated how SAM works with an interactive HTML prototype that allows users to navigate from page to page:
Carrie [interaction designer] takes her phone, and says: “we made this quick prototype”. She shows the clients a ‘demo’ on her phone. She demonstrates how the application works. What can SAM do for the customer? She does not just swap between screens, but interacts with prototype. She clicks on screens, and suddenly we all hear a voice in the room saying “Hello, this is SAM. How can I help you?” Carrie then speaks back to ‘SAM” on her phone, and demonstrates how SAM responds to it.
This fragment firstly shows that the designers consider the prototype a “quick prototype”, a sort of trimmed-down version of what they could