Page 172 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

160 Design Meets Business
After specifying how for each phase, the creatives engaged in activating and/or morphing, and whether the clients experienced liminality, we analyzed and compared how patterns of activating and morphing occurred across projects. In particular, in adherence to the replication logic (Eisen- hardt 1989), we discovered that in all projects the creative workers put more emphasis on activating in the beginning and end of the projects. In the middle of the projects, the liminal phase, the creative workers espe- cially engaged in morphing to make sure that feelings of ambiguity and freedom did not generate frustrations and hampered motivations to pursue the innovation challenge. The results of this process analysis are visible in Table 4 and explained below in the findings.
4.4. Findings
We found that creative workers facilitated liminality through practices of ‘activating’ and ‘morphing’. To illustrate this, we first explain the core concepts: activating, morphing, and liminality, and then we present a case narrative of one project (ASCL) to show in more detail how the creative workers facilitated liminality over time.
4.4.1. Activating
Activating is a form of client empowerment that takes place when crea- tive workers invite clients to explore and play with unfamiliar technologies and creative techniques, while connecting them to other actors they never worked with before. Activating is targeted at building creative confidence (Kelley and Kelley 2013) and stimulating clients to conceive alternative realities by themselves. As one of the creative workers explained: “we want people to grow to do it themselves”, without trying to intervene or steering direction. Typically, when creative workers activated their clients, they performed three activities upon which we elaborate below.
First, the creative workers activated their clients by bringing heteroge- neous actors together. In each project, the creative workers invited not only their clients but also actors from their own network that were interested in the innovation challenge at hand. As a consequence, in each project a wide variety of actors participated including artists, researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and also more genuinely interested ‘citizens’. What all these people have in common is, according to the creative workers, is that they can be considered as ‘frontrunners’, ‘change agents’ or ‘tastemakers’ — the ‘1 percent’ that occupies influential positions with respect to a specific innovation challenge. For example, for E-ID, the creative workers invited a