Page 182 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

170
Design Meets Business
your hands, and then suddenly it is half finished, and then you think ‘yeah, that is really friendly of you, but now I did not do it myself and I did not have so much fun as when I shove it on its place then if you taught me some tricks to do it myself.”
In all projects but E-ID, the clients personally experimented with new technologies and accumulated technical skills. Especially because E-ID lasted shorter than the other projects (3 workshops), a consequence was that it was more difficult to activate clients at the end of E-ID.
On the other hand, an unintended consequence of enhancing ambiguity could be that it triggered more negative sensations of “feeling lost”, “chaos” and even a “hampering motivation”, as several clients mentioned in inter- views. This became visible in ASCL when one of the teams ‘dropped out’ over the summer, because there was little infrastructure offered by Waag, or in Mesch, when a client panicked as no one guided her in the Fab Lab: “Waaah, where do I have to put in my USB stick? It was scary. What did I have to do?” Yet, at the same time, creative workers could also create frus- trations by offering too much guidance in creative processes. For example, in E-ID, the creative workers actively participated in the first workshop and while doing so, displayed their agenda and steered innovation process into a specific direction. As a consequence, a client explained that he did not feel the space to express himself and have a different opinion than Waag’s creative workers. To avoid such situations when liminality became too unsettling, creative workers had to morph and constantly be aware of what is going in projects.
Our analysis of the projects shows that at Waag there is not a clear final phase of liminality. Especially so in the case of E-ID, where besides social drinks no closing event was organized in which the participants could present their world views and reflect on their experience. At most, during ASCL and MESCH, the creative workers offered their clients a stage and emphasized the importance to continue working on the innovation chal- lenge at hand.
4.5. Discussion and Conclusion
By drawing on a qualitative process study of creative workers at a Dutch social innovation hub, aiming at sparking creativity, we have demonstrated how creative workers facilitate liminality for their clients. Liminality is said to be conducive to creativity (Garsten 1999; Sturdy et al. 2006; Swan et al. 2016) and creates feelings of ‘in-betweenness’ and in doing so triggers creativity and innovation (Howard-Grenville et al. 2011; Henfridsson and