Caitlin Krause on creative brightness, digital thriving, and the call for more play
In this episode of Out of the Clouds, host Anne Mühlethaler welcomes back Caitlin Krause for their second conversation. Caitlin is a globally recognised experience designer, educator, author and founder of MindWise , whose work spans digital wellbeing, immersive design, contemplative practice and creative expression . She holds an MFA in poetry, has taught internationally across Belgium and Switzerland, and built the digital wellbeing program about wellbeing and technology at Stanford University. She teaches at the University of Oregon. She advises organisations including TED, The U.S. Air Force, LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Oracle, Evernote, and the U.S. State Department. Caitlin creates human-centered experiences mediated by technology, fusing creativity, meditation, storytelling, collaboration, and emotional intelligence for full life thriving. She is the author of six books, including her most recent work on digital wellbeing and a forthcoming collection of poetry, Poems of Root and Light. Caitlin and Anne first met at TED 2023, whose theme that year was Possibilities — and the thread of possibility runs through their exchange. Anne and Caitlin discuss her newest book, Digital Wellbeing, A transformative guide to thriving in the digital age . The conversation explores the etymology of the word 'digital' itself — a thread Caitlin traces from the digits of the hand through Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth to the immersive computing she works with today. Caitlin speaks to her motivation behind the book: not to produce a manual of healthy habits, nor to surrender to the idea that the machines have already won, but to offer an entry point for people to approach digital technology with less fear and hopefully less overwhelm that so many leaders and teams experience.The book is designed around the conviction that your body is your testing ground, that you get to have your experience and own it, and that the question of technology is ultimately a question of being. Caitlin's framework for immersive design, seven themes she calls the seven Es, anchored in what she describes as wonder-rich spatial computing design, runs through the conversation as both a professional methodology and a personal philosophy. Anne and Caitlin also discuss Caitlin's Shadow Storytelling experience, in which she guided participants from a Zoom call into a shared metaverse landscape for a meditation and storytelling session built around Jungian themes, winter imagery and candlelit caves. Both women explore the question of technology as a dance partner rather than a destination, and what it means to be the embodied physical human deciding how and whether to layer with it. Caitlin also tells the story of how the spirit of play, cultivated through an itinerant childhood in a foreign service family, has directly informed her pedagogy and her approach to guiding people into transformative experiences through technology. The conversation closes with Caitlin reading two poems from her forthcoming collection — 'The Middle Path' and the title poem 'Root and Light' — bringing the episode to a still and luminous end. Connect with Caitlin Caitlin's website: caitlinkrause.com MindWise — Caitlin's consultancy Poems of Root and Light — forthcoming poetry collection Digital Satori — Caitlin's 2023 poetry collection Caitlin’s upcoming course at Kripalu Centre ‘ Awakening Awe ’: Referenced in the episode: John O'Donohue — Irish poet and philosopher Martha Graham — choreographer and dance pioneer, quoted in the episode David Whyte — poet and author whose work Caitlin references Joy Harjo — poet, referenced by Caitlin Ursula K. Le Guin — writer, whose quote about 'there, there' Caitlin shares Esther Perel — referenced for her TED moment about putting down our phones World Economic Forum — referenced in the context of new wellbeing metrics The Story of You — Anne's coaching methodology Visit our website: https://outoftheclouds.com/ Subscribe to Anne's newsletter The Mettā