Page 175 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 163
ambiguity as ‘something different’, ‘not understand(ing) what is happening’, and sometimes even like ‘a culture shock’. Creative workers intentionally created ambiguity around creative processes: “so actually you should think about a process where you keep everything open, and yet build in sufficient safety”, they said. This was done through avoiding introduction rounds, giving little guidelines, questioning normative assumptions, not displaying their own agenda and not assigning tasks. Further, creative workers also created ambiguity through constantly shifting between roles. One client for example said: “again someone else joined [the project]. Other clients similarly remarked: “I did not know who belonged to the Waag and who did not” or “it [the involvement of Waag] is in constant flux, it keeps on changing”.
Freedom is closely related to ambiguity and here refers to the creative workers efforts to create psychological safety among their clients. As their clients experienced freedom, they were more inclined to alter their routi- nized behavior and express innovative perspectives. In projects, creative workers tried to generate feelings of freedom among clients by encouraging them to speak out and organizing their own activities, without judging them or pushed into a specific direction. Creative workers emphasized that they purposely created ‘an open playing field’, as this gave clients “an equal chance of being heard” and “acting in crazy ways in which they are not used to act”. As one creative put it:
“What I always try to do is turn sessions into safe places for exchanging ideas while enforcing the kind of ground rules where people listen to each other, where people respect each other and where people can also address points that are difficult and important to them. And I think it is a very per- sonal thing for the facilitator or the moderator to try to be more sensitive to people and give them a feeling of safety.”
Finally, during the projects we studied, creative workers tried to create community feelings, that is encouraging the emergence of collective feelings of belonging among their clients and other project participants. In interviews, the creative workers referred to this in terms of creating ‘a group feeling’, ‘a club’, and ‘a feeling of togetherness’ or ‘turn[ing] a group of ... strangers into a community’ that shared a common interest and purpose. Developing such communal feelings could enhance feelings of freedom among clients or ‘the will to easily share things with each other’. Also, community feelings helped clients to take responsibility for devel- oping innovative solutions by themselves. In the following, we explain in more detail how liminality is facilitated through practices of activating and morphing.