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Prior research suggests that boundary objects gain meaning through group interaction. Drawing from the literature on strategic ambiguity, we explore the possibility that individuals strategically create potential boundary objects in an attempt to shape the meanings that groups develop. From ethnographic observations of automotive engineers, we identify 2 creation strategies: ambiguity (to create objects that support multiple meanings) and clarity (to create objects that permit a particular meaning). We detail design activities that engineers undertook to create objects under each strategy. We find that, when creating objects, engineers favored a strategy of ambiguity, which they believed would foster healthy long‐term group interactions, over a strategy of clarity, which they tended to employ only when they expected resistance to their ideas.

Representations, such as graphs and images, have been shown to help facilitate communication and coordination across knowledge boundaries. Many studies examine representations’ effects during and after interaction, characterizing them as tools that help communicate local understandings with individuals who have differing knowledge. This study explores whether the anticipation of building representations to communicate across knowledge boundaries significantly shapes a community’s work. To explore this question, the study develops a theoretical framework that extends the concept of performativity and then presents ethnographic data from four weather research teams collaborating with different organizations to develop tailored forecasting technologies. Analysis reveals that researchers’ need to represent weather model outputs to their partners shaped the practices they used to produce those models. By uncovering the presence and influence of “anticipatory work,” the findings paint representations not as passive communicators of established knowledge but as catalysts that shape the form of routine work.

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Diverse teams may potentiate greater creativity through divergent thinking. Yet research suggests these teams face a dilemma: the very features that make them promising are associated with persistent communication challenges that threaten their effectiveness. We turn to the literature on dialectical tensions to argue that a process of oscillation, consisting of repeated alternation between moments of divergence, emphasizing the differentiation of perspectives, and moments of convergence, emphasizing integrating ideas to produce coordination, may mobilize the tension between differentiation and integration effectively. We explore the utility of our framework by applying it to the experiences of a diverse cohort of researchers who engaged in a purposefully designed oscillatory process to generate research projects related to climate resilience. Our multimethod evaluation of this case indicates that oscillation was effective for creative idea generation. This work contributes to both practice and scholarship in interdisciplinary teamwork support, creativity, and organizations.