Page 179 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
P. 179

                4. Facilitating Liminality 167
even able to successfully work with the fabrication tools and develop their sensing hardware without explicit instruction.
After a period of experimenting with new technologies and creative methods, clients felt activated to explore innovation possibilities with new technologies because they sensed that they were supported by the crea- tive workers at Waag. At the same time, however, clients mentioned that they were confused about the unfolding of the project. One of the clients for example said during an interview: “it was rather unclear what is going to happen. There was no clear project plan or outcome. We only had the schedule in which the workshops were listed”. Instead of offering their clients more clarification and hence reducing their sense of ambiguity around creative processes and planning, the creative workers publicly stated in the following workshop that experiencing uncertainty is part of the project and “things will become clearer in due time”. Taken together, in the second and third workshop, the creative workers morphed in order to restore emerging feelings of community while activating their clients to freely explore new technologies and feel comfortable with ambiguity by not offering clear information about the planning.
After the first three workshops, Waag’s creative workers chose to give the teams some more freedom to explore what they had learned inde- pendently and take responsibility for moving the project forward; there were no guided workshops scheduled for the rest of the summer. The teams were invited to self-organize the following three workshops. The creative workers’ involvement in the project became limited to tracking the teams’ progress on the online platform they developed at the beginning of the project. In interviews, the clients at first framed this period as liber- ating. Coming out of a period of guided workshops and having gained crea- tive confidence and learned new technical skills, they felt activated. Yet, as time passed, the teams had trouble developing the prototypes of the digital sensors. “Some of them had never worked with technology before”, one of the creative workers said. Without support of Waag, the teams’ motiva- tion quickly dwindled and one team even halted their efforts completely. This damaged the sense of community that had emerged in the workshops before: “I felt like I was trying to tackle this challenge alone”, one of the clients said during an interview. Fearing that the project would fall apart the creative workers morphed back to a more central facilitator role in the project and organized extra meetings. About this, one client said:
“After the summer the fire went out a little. Then, they adopted a new ap- proach. They decided to organize extra meetings, and also changed the






























































































   177   178   179   180   181