Page 178 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

166 Design Meets Business
Soon after this reshuffling of teams, the creative workers introduced the first activity of the workshop to the teams: getting familiar with existing technologies. First, Waag’s creative workers asked their clients to present the technologies they currently used to combat urban pollution. One of the clients presented a sensor to measure air pollution, using a lot of jargon and profession-specific terminology. After the client presentations, the other project participants were asked to challenge the clients’ perspectives. One of the creative workers motivated this by saying: “you just knocked all our hope to the ground, and now we [creatives] have to pull you up again”. To show the other project participants what he meant, the creative worker started himself with challenging the client’s perspective: “you said that [measuring the city environment with homemade sensors] is not possible. But that is not the case — I think it depends on how people relate to each other and organize themselves to use the technology”. In doing so, the creative workers activated their clients by encouraging a new kind of imag- inative thinking that would allow them to see that their current actions were problematic and thus required change.
Besides client presentations, in the following workshop, the Waag’s crea- tive workers invited the teams to ‘design something, and actually go and make it’, as one of the creative workers said. This time, the creative workers organized activities that were more targeted and aimed at developing a ‘digital sensor’. They invited their clients and other project participants to get to know innovative and Do It Yourself (DIY) technologies through organizing a hands-on session in their Fab lab in which all sorts of machines like 3D printers and laser cutters were displayed. Because this was the first time for most project participants to ever to handle new technologies, exper- imenting with such new technologies was experienced as challenging and triggered feelings of ambiguity among them. Identifying the need of clients to get more guidance, two new creative workers joined the workshop as technology experts. Their job was to assist the teams when they had ques- tions about the technologies under and make the teams feel safe enough to move beyond the fears they had. This becomes visible in the following frag- ment of the project report that was written by the creative workers of Waag:
[Some clients] lack of hardware and maker expertise made the design and construction process considerably more difficult. The [clients’] skills hand- icap was eventually surmounted through working every week with Emma, one of Waag’s hardware developers and sensor expert extraordinaire. ... [A client] felt they were ‘really lucky’ to have her to guide them along the way. ‘Without Emma, it would have been impossible,’ he said. After she [the cre- ative worker] vacated the Fablab for summer holidays the wind group was