Hi! 👋 I’m Catherine Woodiwiss. Thanks for visiting.
My work is largely about what makes us human, in a world that’s increasingly being built for tech.
Tools I use to ask these questions include: Participatory design, systems modeling, concept modeling, service design, journalism, storytelling, conversation, facilitation, hospitality, art, & humor.
For an idea of audience spread, one of my favorite stories was shared by both David Brooks and Burning Man. And lots of other people, but that’s just a range I find especially delightful. I’m currently funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and GEMH (Games for Emotional & Mental Health) Lab.
I’m opening up my calendar to curiosity conversations every Friday — reserve a time here, or reach out below!
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So what’s the Big Idea you’re working on now?
Something that’s so obvious, it’s invisible: Relational healing. We each incur tremendous losses in our life, and we can’t heal from those losses alone. Duh. But neither our systems nor our social scripts are adequately supporting this reality. So this is the vector I’m playing in: That we need both personal wisdom and scientific data to help us heal well, together; and that bringing together scientists, researchers, medical professionals, therapists, social workers, designers, artists, and storytellers can help us build more, and better, resources to help us meaningfully interact with each other around healing.
I’m building new forms of co-designed products (like a Social Audio Journal) and participatory processes (like a Healing Design Jam) to expand the surface area of people sharing wisdom and expertise toward collective healing. My work is funded by the Templeton Foundation, & the Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab in the Netherlands. I’m also contributing to a book with Fetzer Institute about the future of spiritual infrastructures and social technologies, and how collective healing practices can inform both.
Come visit our emerging project at the Social Healing Project here!
And see earlier instances of my thinking at Sojourners, Interintellect, & Austin Center for Design.
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Cool. What other sorts of things do you make?
I’m a journalist & a designer. I love building for things we fail at talking about well in public.
A little while back, I sourced a project on selfies, inviting folks to explore their relationship to identity and faces through the technology of a selfie for 2 weeks…and got beautiful, meditative responses on chronic illness, divorce, empty nest syndrome, job hunting, moving, flirting, and loneliness from participants (public gallery under construction — to come). It pretty radically changed the way I think about our contemporary compulsion to self-document our lives, and how powerful that can be when we’re intentional about it.
I recently partnered with Yoxi & the Guild of Future Architects on a project called The Current, which is developing new models for wealth and large-scale giving based on an ethic of abundance and trust. It’s an idea that runs counter to both traditional philanthropy and effective altruism, exploring what happens to our conceptions of money, wealth, agency, and identity when we simply…give money freely, in large quantities! I found this wild and compelling, and still do. I spent many hours with high net wealth individuals committed to giving away their wealth, exploring the psychological effects of wealth transition and uncovering their personal wounds around money.
That led me to creating my own “history of money” memoir, and I’m working on structuring a series of co-creative conversations about how money has shaped our personal lives and ethics, over time.
At the same time, I waded into web3, partnering with DAOs as operators for collective organizing and distributed ownership. I helped launch & host CABIN’s first Build Week, pioneering a new model of hybrid relational economics between physical and web3 environments.
Right now, I’m part of the founding team for Liminal Learning, a program and methodology for young people aimed at helping them explore and develop lives of meaning and purpose. One core hunch: That we can most courageously and ambitiously navigate the huge question marks of the future by doing so together. We’re designing curriculum for interdisciplinary curiosity, intergenerational wisdom, and collective practice. More to come…
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So you work with people in design, journalism, science, politics, philanthropy, education … who else?
People who have experienced threshold moments and are re-negotiating life in liminal spaces. Some of my favorite published interviews are here.
People sitting at the nexus of subculture and zeitgeist. A few of my faves: this story about the invention of Christmas as commodified nostalgia (yes, The Atlantic let me write about earmuffs…that’s a personal W); this story about religious hackers building “open-source theology;” this profile of a Texan evangelical influencer going all in on Beto O’Rourke; this story of the existential tremors of AlphaGO’s victory vs Lee Sodol; and this story featuring fellow journalists speaking candidly about negotiating trauma and other occupational hazards of our digital newsfeeds.
My favorite people are interesting, curious, and wise humans doing compelling things at the margins and/or backstages of dominant culture. …If that sounds like you, I will probably want to yes-and/build with you (!), or learn from you, or interview/write about your sub-niche. Maybe all three (eventually)!
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What else do you write about?
At my latest publication, my fabulous co-editors trusted me with a column focusing on some of these margins and niches (appropriately titled “Marginalia”) — here you can find essays on digital futurism + the desert; sacred spaces + climate change; horror films + white women audiences; technological Icaruses; urban design + heatwaves; resistance art + political nostalgia; and VR + the limits of empathy.
Sometimes I write more personal, memoir-style essays: like this one, on memorializing + war + personal loss in museums … this one, on how cities hold memories and ghosts of lives past … or this one, exploring group living + the contours of loneliness for the modern Mature Adult in America (am I one? are you? it’s weirdly hard to say!).
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…You mentioned systems modeling?
In the distant past, I led nutritional interventions with new ready-to-use therapeutic foods in developing countries, consulting with ambassadors from Central Asia and North Africa and working on military-government-NGO partnerships for medical relief in the Caribbean.
Now, for my day job, I lead research into data services and digital products for global supply chain operators at Texas’ #1 grocery store (IYKYK 🤠).
On any given day, you can find me developing systems maps on communication & experience dynamics within organizations; or how data is shared between dozens of products and teams … or sketching stocks and flows for how jealousy operates in friendships 🔮(seriously! systems maps are a super underutilized technology for relational sense-making. ask me about my long-running “insecurity log” and how to get yourself laughing about your angst in under 2 min. flat).
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Anything else you love or just do for fun?
I’m a performer. I love jamming with others on stage — whether that’s making music (singing, playing fiddle & the occasional guitar / mandolin/autoharp/spoons); or acting; or public speaking (ask me also about my first-ever speaking gig. It involves SXSW, a project demo, and two sets of missing teeth).
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I host a lot. The act of in-person gathering, especially in homes, is, to me, intimately and preciously human. One of the projects I’m proudest of is Homestage DC, a DIT (do-it-together) musical network in Washington D.C., where we matched talented musicians with aspiring concert hosts & home venues for intimate, personal, word-of-mouth, all-proceeds-to-musicians shows.
I love thinking through how to build for intimacy and relationality in our online gathering spaces. I regularly facilitate design sprints & workshops, salons, and artist gatherings. (I’m currently spinning up a few forms of creative meetup nights in Austin — reach out if you want in!)
Helping people find meaning, challenge, and growth through quality, invitational, emergent playtime together is one of my deepest gifts and greatest loves.
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I’m part of Bloom Collective — a group of artists, designers, researchers, academics, scientists, and writers in Europe, Canada, & the US who found each other online in 2020. We started making stuff together, called ourselves Bloom, and now we partner in/advise(/where possible, fund!) each other’s projects, and meet IRL at least 1x a year. It’s a blast. We’re looking into how to help other blooms find each other, too.
In 2021, we received a grant from iPortunus House & the European Commission: Culture & Creativity to meet in Berlin and explore, through art and emerging technologies, what the pandemic meant for loneliness, togetherness, and isolation. We played with then-infant generative art and chatGPT to create a pop-up gallery exhibit, “Alone/Together.”
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Last thing: I’m a harmonizer — in music, and in life. This means I’m a fantastic +1 for entrepreneurs, founders, independent researchers, and placemakers. It also means I’m always looking for people who know how to play well with others and recognize the value of working with dynamic, generative balance. My very favorite colleagues are people who can happily switch between several roles in a metaphorical rock band. 🎸
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If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear from you! 💌
Especially if you:
Live in the Austin area
Work in healing spaces (/want to!)
Want to chat re: the frontiers of humaning in this wildly unpredictable age
Want me to speak, write, or facilitate on the same!
For now, I’ll leave you with this, my current favorite ode to letting our niche obsessions yield something hilarious + true …
To great work + great fun,
Catherine
catherine.h.woodiwiss@gmail.com
Credit for this website formatting concept to May-Li Khoe, my colleague at the interaction design association (IxDA) ‘21 awards and one of my favorite designers. If you don’t yet know her excellent work, get to know it at the link!