For many, when they think of the word "beauty" it brings to mind images of poets, of paintings hung on gallery walls. Few think about the design of a circuit board or the ways in which data can be used to find patterns in human behavior. The arts and the sciences are not confined to two mutually exclusive realms.
“We get comfortable with what's familiar and stepping into a new world, suddenly that part of our brain that keeps us comfortable says, ‘wait a minute, I don’t know if this is a good idea...’ we start disrupting the neural patterning,” said Katrina Doran, an Irving-based artist who works with companies in the tech and health industries. “There's something about acknowledging what's been created in the past, having a relationship with it, and making something with it that you’ve never thought of before.”
Doran believes that creation comes from the disruption of the normality of everyday life and from building something new from the pieces of the old -- A thought that could just as easily be tailored to a number of startup’s mission statements.
“I see an expansion integrating the arts into the everyday world,” she said.
Though her interest and participation in the arts community traces a long line through her life, for the past six years Doran has been using her skills to bridge the gap between art and innovation. Doran hosts workshops for companies in the area and around the state as a sort of team-building exercise. Some of her clients include the Lubbock Methodist Hospital System and Deloitte, a consulting and advisory company that has offices in Plano.
In these workshops, teams work together to create mosaic sculptures piece by piece. The process pushes employees to move beyond their comfort zone - working in a medium many are unfamiliar with, collaborating across teams and disciplines to build something entirely new, and to learn how to creatively solve problems they have never encountered before.
With her work in hospitals, Doran is hoping to expand the program not only to the DFW-area, but to also bring patients in on the project to help build trust and understanding between themselves and the staff – hopefully creating a better environment for all and potentially improving patient outcomes.
“To access innovative thought, we have to first ascertain where we are with whatever is going on… there's something about acknowledging what's been created in the past, having a relationship with it, and making something with it that you’ve never thought of before,” Doran said. “You get comfortable enough with this process to then create something… that becomes a beautiful centerpiece of art that can be a reflection of you, individually and the team that you’re associated with.”
Doran attributes her work to an intersection of her interests: art and human psychology, a degree in psychology also helps out too. Working through new, complicated problems makes connections between people. It also works to make physical connections within oneself – neurons firing in different patterns in the brain, creating new neural pathways.
She also says that in the process people learn to see their own worth, and how that fits within the structure of the organization; employees learn to see how the individual parts make up the whole.
“It's pretty cool that it becomes a centerpiece and a motor for new ideas,” Doran said.
