Page 177 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 165
the subdomain of the innovation challenge. These activities allowed the team members to sensitize with the innovation challenge while at the same time getting to know each other and identify their comple- mentary skills Towards the end of the workshop, the creative workers offered the teams the possibility to meet either physically, at one of Waag’s labs, or digitally, via an online platform that was created for the project. Moreover, at the start of the project, the creative workers put efforts in creating a social environment outside of the daily realities of their clients. They achieved this by bringing together diverse actors that usually did not collaborate on innovation challenges and offering them an alternative physical work space that is not associated with their everyday context.
Bringing people into a state of liminality. After the first workshop, for about a month, until the second workshop in June, the teams worked independently at either Waag’s labs or in their own organizations, on their chosen subdomain. They were asked to do some field research and gather empirical data about their audience and the overall problem. In the second workshop, the composition of the teams shifted unexpectedly as not all former team members were present. At the same time, the creative workers opened the workshop to all interested audiences and new faces joined the project. One of the clients explained:
“In the preliminary sessions you are exploring what exactly the question is that you are tackling. You are invited to think out of the box as much as possible, and generate many ideas. At one point you need to narrow that down and focus on a particular question, and then you feel that you solved it in one session. As in this next session, new people joined our group, it started all over again. We had the same kind of discussion [in the teams]... Also, you need to get to know each other again and build trust again... It seemed like we had taken a step back.”
As this fragment shows, the inclusion of new actors in the project enhanced feelings of ambiguity while at the same time distorted the emerging sense of community in teams. As the clients complained to the creative workers about this, the creative workers identified the need to intervene and morphed their roles from creativity expects to more active facilitators of team processes. They hosted an extra session in which they brought the new actors up to speed about the project: “the newcomers were asking a number of questions, so Christine [a Waag creative worker] did an introductory session with them before letting them return to the rest of their team”.