Artist, explorer or co-creator? A narrative analysis of designers' career stories

There has been a call for better understanding of the role of narratives in identity development. Simultaneously, there has been a marked rise of design in organizations, and the roles and official spheres of influence of designers is shifting. Although studied since the 1960s, design cognition research has depended largely on data from design students and individual professionals. As a result, we know little of the identity work designers engage in. To inform both design research and identity research in more general, we conduct a narrative analysis on the interviews of 26 professional designers employed by a design agency and working in different locations in North America. We find Bakhtinian literary genres and chronotopes to provide a useful framework for analysing these designers’ identity narratives. The results show how conjunctions of time and space often serve as organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events and produce meanings that shape the narratives.