Meaningful Moments at Work : Frames Evoked by In-House and Consultancy Designers

Design is increasingly recognized as a competitive advantage for companies, but we know relatively little of the activities and perceptions of designers in different organizational contexts. Based on 69 semi-structured interviews with 34 in-house and 35 consultancy designers, this study investigates the type and framing of 291 reported meaningful moments. We found different dominant experience frames in the two organizational contexts with different connections to innate needs of competence, relatedness and autonomy. Most meaningful moments in both organizations were related to the social context and implications rather than the design activities themselves. The results highlight professional design being an inherently social and contextual activity, urging more research to take an organizationally situated perspective to design.