AnneMarie Dorland - Changemaker Profile
Dr. AnneMarie Dorland (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Marketing in the Bissett School of Business at Mount Royal University. In this profile, she discusses her approaches to creative thinking and her ethnographic research around how folks employ creativity. Before joining Mount Royal, AnneMarie worked in the arts community, in creative design agencies, and was the Director of Communications at the Alberta University for the Arts.
Could you tell me about yourself?
My background is in design, and I’ve worked on the agency and design studio side for a really long time. [A few years ago] I was the Director of Communications at the Alberta University for the Arts. Afterwards, I went back and did my PhD and cycled back into the academic side [of institutions]. [The beginning of my career] was working in nonprofits and small-artists run centers, using a “proceed until apprehended” kind of mentality in order to reach our goals.
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in Marketing in the Department of Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Social innovation. I teach classes that are focused on writing, storytelling and sense-making to our marketing students. My research is focused on how creative people work and what we can learn from them, so we could all apply those practices in the way that we live, work, play, volunteer, organize and create change in the world. I spend a lot of my research time working with creative entrepreneurs and designers. The best way to describe [my research] - is doing ethnographic studies of how creative people collaborate, work, or practice in a way that's different than what the rest of us are doing; so that I can take those practices and pull them out and use them in class, but also share them with other organizations who are looking to amplify their creativity.
How do creative folks work differently?
The main thread that I’ve found is that the commodified ways that we think that [creative folks] are working, like, “thinking outside the box” or “move fast and break things,” that kind of a mentality is not as accurate of a portrayal as we'd like to think. These are people who are working creatively day after day, whose job is to see the world differently, to generate a new approach. The basic statement that guides all design is “changing the present to the preferable” or “the present to the possible.” So, being able to see the possible and believing that you could be the architect of that small change in the world requires you not to “move fast and break things.” In reality, it's a grind. It's a slow, iterative, collaborative, participatory grind where you have to come up with an idea and evolve it the way water changes stone; just slowly and patiently with small iterations until you get to where you want to be. I think that's not the narrative that we use when we tell people to be creative. What we're really telling them is to be outlandish, improvisational, or be innovative. But creativity is a process of making, not a process of breaking. So, that's maybe what we miss in the myths about creativity.
What does it mean to be a changemaker?
Being a changemaker means believing that things could be different as a foundational basis. It means to be an inherent optimist, but it also means to be committed to your output, not your outcome. If you're a changemaker, you’re not trying to see change happen magically out there in the world. You’re not sitting around on your hands waiting for change to happen; you’re working actively to create something that moves the needle.
What big, beautiful question drives your work?
How can we all become more creative in everything that we're doing? In the design world, we talk a lot about the four different kinds of creativity. There's “little c creativity”, which is doing something daily in a new way; like taking a different path to work. That is an act of creativity and it may seem mundane, but it's the kind of thing that keeps our neurons connecting. Then there is “small c creativity”, which is what we think of as being creative - trying a new recipe, painting something for the first time, a small creative act. We also have “pro c creativity,” which is professional creativity, you are using creative practice to make something - architects, fashion designers, interior designers, and musicians. Finally, we have “big C creativity”, which is the big, wild, beautiful, amazing ideas, the best practitioners in the world - the Van Goghs and Mozarts. Our problem is that we just talk about “big C creativity”, we never talk about how we get there, not everybody makes it to “big C”. So the question that guides my research is, how do we get to “little c” and “pro c creativity” to get to the point where everybody is able to enact the principles of creative professionals in their daily work, to do something differently?
How do you embody changemaking in your work?
For me, my passion is my teaching, and everything I do feeds back into that. A big part of that for me is creating change in the classroom, because that fosters that spirit of change in the students that graduate from my classes. So a big part of that is being open to trying new things. being open to that design informed process of participation, and design thinking as we're working together on creating things. In terms of being a changemaker, to me it's teaching the dialog: “What does it mean to learn? What does it mean to collaborate? What does it mean to be creative?” Those are the things I'm trying to move the needle on most often.
How do you see changemaking happening at MRU?
Where I see Mount Royal doing really well at fostering a collaborative spirit of changemaking, it's very much in the way that we center our students. I am not just speaking about the student experience, like small class sizes, because you can be disengaged in a small class. It's the interpersonal commitment at Mount Royal, where I feel like this is a community in a much different way, and I feel like voices are heard in a much different way. To me, that's how change starts, is ensuring that the people who are impacted by the change are the people helping make the change.