Page 174 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                162 Design Meets Business
First, Waag’s creative workers morphed by sensing clients’ needs and questions. To identify what was needed in a situation, the creatives had to constantly remain aware of what was going on during project activities, regardless of the role they were playing. They called it having ‘a sort of an antenna’ or ‘sensor’. Sensing needs and anticipating questions, in turn, allowed the crea- tives to recognize opportunities for contribution and respond to them.
Second, instead of fixating their own roles, creative workers morphed by changing roles during projects. For example, during the MESCH project, the client needed help developing digital content for a prototype. In response to this, one creative morphed from facilitator to content strategist. Crea- tives often took on a variety of roles during a single project:
“We facilitate, we can moderate, we can bring people together if that’s what is needed, and we can develop products, make prototypes. We can organize events. We can jumpstart communities. We can facilitate com- munities. We can talk with hackers, and inhabitants, and professionals, and politicians, and the business world ...We can spot trends. We can make technology mash-ups really quickly”.
Similarly, the founder of Waag highlighted “we are polymorphs” which she later explained as “adopting various identities”. To be able to offer such a wide variety of expertise, Waag employs and collaborates with creative workers who have broad skill-sets.
Third, the creative workers morphed by trading personal involvement. When creatives were unable to fulfill a role, they stepped out of the project and other creative workers joined in. For example, during ASCL, four different people fulfilled the role of facilitator. Moreover, through morphing, creative workers could intervene in situations in which clients needed guidance to move creative processes forward.
4.4.3. Liminality
During liminality, clients experience feelings of ‘in-betweenness’ informed by a sense of community, freedom, and ambiguity (Turner 2008 [1969]). In the innovation projects we studied, liminality was especially sensed during the ‘middle phase’, after the clients disassociated from ‘busi- ness as usual’ and before experience clients before clients went back into their organizational realities.
First, liminality was characterized by feelings of ambiguity. When clients experienced ambiguity, they faced a lack of clarity around what was happening in the project or around the role of creative workers. Clients experienced


























































































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