Page 176 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

164 Design Meets Business
4.4.4. Case narrative of Amsterdam Smart Citizens Lab (ASCL)
In order to show how the creative workers facilitated liminality, we will recount the history of one project: ASCL (see also Table 4.1). This allows us not only to give more details of the practices per phase, but also to enlighten how all the core the concepts of activating, morphing and limi- nality are related.
The aim of ASCL was broadly to explore the possibilities of open tech- nologies in combating city pollution (see Table 4.1). A major challenge in the project was to introduce Waag’ s clients, who were accustomed to thinking in terms of their own expertise and technology, to citizen science. ASCL was organized around eight workshops. In these workshops, nine client organizations — governmental institutions, academic institutes and research centers — as well as twenty actors from diverse backgrounds, ranging from business professionals to university students - participated. We narrate the unfolding of the project according to the three phases that van Gennep (1960 [1909]) developed, emphasizing how creative workers activated and morphed in each phase.
Separating people from organizational realities. The project was launched with a workshop in May 2015 that was hosted at Waag’s office. Waag offers a creative environment that looked is different than regular work environments and resembles with that of other innovation hubs due, among others, the display of work tables, technologies and fabrication tools. One of the clients remarked: “Creativity is everywhere you look”. A key challenge in the beginning of the project was to develop a community out of the “sixty strangers” that participated in ASCL, as one of the crea- tive workers said. In order to encourage such feelings of belonging, already at the workshop’s start, one of Waag’s creative workers asked the clients to join the other project participants and self-organize in teams for the entire duration of the project. Each team was organized around a subdomain, including traffic, air, water, and noise pollution, and consisted of five to six members. Forming teams was an important step in creating not only a community but also a shared responsibility around the innovation chal- lenge. One of the creative workers said: “we need people who are not only part of the project when it is important, but who feel co-ownership during the entire project”.
Creative workers further enhanced feelings of community by acti- vating the teams in collective activities. One of the activities for instance demanded the teams to play a game and explore the team members complementary knowledge and skills. Another activity was to better understand what the team members independently knew about