The question motivating this chapter is: What are the key characteristics of double stimulation and what is its role in concept formation in an everyday work activity facing transformations? The analysis shows how volitional change actions emerge and take shape in processes of double stimulation in critical encounters, and how they lead to attempts at concept formation. Critical encounters are fruitful breeding grounds for double stimulation and concept formation efforts in work activities. They may be described with the help of two dimensions, namely the dimension of restrictive vs. expansive use of artifacts and the dimension of incidental vs. planned use of artifacts. Conceptualization efforts often accompany the volitional actions resulting from the expansive use of artifacts. These conceptualization efforts are seldom conscious attempts to fully define or explain a concept. The conceptualization efforts are predominantly fragmentary and focused on specific aspects of the emerging concept. In this light, conceptualization efforts in critical encounters resemble the construction of a mosaic pattern distributed in time and social space across many actors and encounters. Although seemingly modest and piecemeal, such efforts may lead to a radical sea change over time.

In cultural-historical activity theory, the move from orientation to action is connected to the experiencing of contradictions as personally significant conflicts of motives. Our study builds on the theory of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS). We conducted a Change Laboratory intervention with adolescents to support them to work on their motive conflicts and to construct and implement projects they found significant. With the help of Sannino’s model, we analyse the evolution of students’ projects as efforts to move from mental future orientation to practical and material future-making. In our data, the conflict of motives and the creation of second stimuli emerged as the most critical steps in the TADS process. We argue that it is time to make the shift from studying young people’s future orientations as private mental phenomena to fostering and analysing future-making as material public actions that generate use-value and have an impact beyond the individual.