Page 181 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 169
4.4.5. Comparing activating and morphing across cases
Also, in the other projects we studied (see Table 4.1), Waag’s creative workers facilitated liminality for their clients by separating them from existing organizational realities, throwing them into the deep end, and finally helping them to stand up again and share their transformative expe- riences with others in existing organizational realities (see Table 4). This was achieved through the combined interplay of activating and morphing. While activating happened in all phases, morphing was primarily done in the middle phase. Interestingly, in all three projects the creative workers put efforts in activating their clients to build a community of like-minded people from diverse backgrounds around the innovation challenge. In a way, this community functioned as an alternative community to the one experienced in daily organizational realities and helped to build a collec- tive responsibility with respect to the innovation challenge.
After this, especially in the second phase, in all projects ambiguity was heightened. Not only did ambiguity emerge around the community as the participants of workshops sometimes changed, but ambiguity also evolved around the roles of creative workers themselves as the latter engaged in morphing. For example, in Mesch, one of the clients reflected on one of the meetings with Waag and said: “at one moment we were at the table with five people, to talk about the Loupe [a prototype], (...) and I thought: “Who are all these people?”. Ambiguity was also created around creative processes. For example, in Mesch, the creative workers asked the clients to put on a “paper helmet” and use “toilet rolls” as vernaculars. Instead of explaining the purpose of the prototypes or offering them solid guidelines, the creative workers asked the clients to freely play with it and identify possible usages of it. Clients described this experience as a “culture shock”.
Our analysis of the projects shows that enhancing ambiguity in the middle phase could have a stimulating effect, but also has unintended consequences. On the one hand, not knowing where the creative process is heading, offered the clients the freedom to come up with their own innova- tive directions. This was especially the case in projects in which clients did not only get introduced to creative methods but also hands on experience with new technologies. For example, in Mesch a client said:
“I really had the feeling that I did not only got help, but that I learned something from it, and that we really did it together, but that it was still mine, from me and my colleague. It is great if you work on something for a while that someone does not suddenly takes over. Not that when you are doing a Rubik’s cube, someone says ‘oh, I will help’ and then pulls it out of