Page 95 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 83
possibly develop. Indeed, during her study and in her first projects at Fjord, Carrie developed the skills to developed technologically advanced prototypes that were not only aesthetically pleasing but also functional. At the same time, by demonstrating a clickable prototype, the designers could give their clients a sense of what the design solution could ultimately look like while demonstrating their design skills. In particular, Carrie here demonstrated that she was up to date about emerging technologies, such as voice recognition and digital advisory, and was capable of building complex technologies.
Further, they sought other ways to differentiate themselves from other occupations through material practices. More specifically, we observed various situations in which designers made visual impressions of their own work activities instead of sharing the content of their work. In other words, instead of showing what they were working on, they showed that they were working. For example, in the beginning of the project we followed, in the very beginning of the design project when the designers worked in the office of the clients, the designers made a time-lapse video of their own working session:
Paul took his phone from the table and said to the other designers: ‘I made a really cool time lapse from the past two hours of us discussing’. He showed the video to the rest of the designers. Cleo responds: ‘the video shows how it is getting dark, so cool’.
After this, the fieldworker asked Paul why he made the video. He responded: “it is useful to show this video later to the client and show what we did’. The designers did not only capture their work processes on video but also through making pictures. This can be exemplified by turning to another moment in the project we followed. The first six weeks, the designers were on the road to do interviews. They did not share their insights with clients, except during quick ‘updates’ via Skype. This created frustrations among the clients, who felt that the work of designers was like “a black-box”. One of them explained it as following: “as if everything happens behind a wall”. Interestingly, instead of sharing their insights and making clients part of the design processes, the designers decided to make “weekly status reports”. In these reports, they offered the clients a summary of their work activities accompanied by pictures of themselves at work. Besides capturing situations in real-time, it also happened that designers ‘staged’ performances of their work. For example, one moment during the project we followed, the fieldworker and a designer called Jane were asked by the designers to pretend analysing the posters that were