“Andrea Hiott is a philosopher and educator in the cognitive sciences with advanced degrees in philosophy, neuroscience and world heritage (department of urban planning and civil engineering). She collaborates at the intersection of technology and philosophy, taking phenomenological and ecological approaches to intelligence and mobility, and forging paths beyond traditional scales.
Currently a researcher at numerous universities, she is also the author of various books, including Thinking Small and (coming 2026) Holding Paradox. She has long worked on issues of motoring and mobility as a consultant, writer, and ghostwriter. Andrea has worked extensively for numerous museums, artists, collectors, and agencies. She is also developing the framework of Way-making and the practice of Navigability and is dedicated to empowering individuals, audiences and organizations to notice and build philosophical perspectives towards better personal & collective goals. Andrea has written about, and worked in, many diverse environments, from the Peace Corps to the transportation sector to university classrooms to neuroscience foundations and technology labs.
This experience and perspective allows her to expand traditional definitions of landscape and delve into human movement and transportive technology at scales beyond just the geographic. Just as importantly, however, it allows her to discuss and work towards a better understanding of how movement affects mental, emotional and imagined space.
She is also the founder of the Love and Philosophy project and works with Making Ways.”
Making Ways is a multimedia care collective dedicated to navigating complexity through paradox, connection, and philosophical inquiry. The company creates & hosts conversations, podcasts, books, and online materials that explore the vital practice of care—caring for ideas, relationships, communities, and the intricate webs that connect them all. At the heart of Making Ways is the Love & Philosophy podcast series, particularly the "Beyond Dichotomy" conversation stream, which explores what it means to think beyond binary oppositions. Through mostly unscripted dialogues across traditional divides, these conversations practice philosophy as a verb—engaging with topics like constellation thinking, planetary consciousness, embodied memory, and the care of things. The approach is kaleidoscopic: seeing multiple perspectives at once, holding tensions without collapsing them, and recognizing that truth often emerges not from choosing sides but from holding the space between them. Making Ways publishes accessible philosophical pamphlets and books, including the "Embracing Paradox" series—light guides for developing the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in mind at once while maintaining motivation and meaning in troubled times. These materials bridge rigorous academic thought with lived experience, making complex philosophical and scientific ideas relevant to everyday navigation. The company's work is grounded in what founder Andrea Hiott calls the "waymaking" or "navigational approach"—understanding cognition, consciousness, and care as dynamic processes of orientation and relating. From discussions of interbrain synchrony to radical embodied memory, from double consciousness to planetary cognitive ecology, Making Ways creates spaces where public care, philosophical rigor, & genuine curiosity meet. This is care work in the deepest sense: caring enough to think deeply, to listen across difference, to evolve our language and frameworks, creatig conversational paths
Personal Bio: All my life, I’ve been motivated towards the same goal: Finding ways to move beyond either/or mindsets, explore our multiplicity and connect the cognitive sciences in ways that are healthier for all minds everywhere. My academic research, public conversations, books, projects, podcasts, and philosophical approach (way-making) are all towards this same idea. Thank you for being interested in this, and for being here. Love, Andrea
Recent books: Holding Paradox: Navigational Approach to Mind, coming to US later this year
Recent paper: Radical Embodied Relation
A quick note about Way-making: Way-making can refer to cognition or movement, but it does not mean cognition and movement could ever be defined into one another. Still, having this term does make it easier to study ‘movement' and ‘cognition’ as patterns of the same process. Another way of saying it: We are not collapsing cognition and movement into one another, but rather showing them as different approaches of a shared processed, any assessment of which much be clearly linked to the regularities of context and to the path-dependency of whatever is being assessed.
Recent films and television series that I have been in include The Bug and Cars that Changed the World.
The following has not been updated since 2024. There are many more links since then which will be updted in time.
Recent podcast appearances include for Business Insider, for the Idea Cast Interview Series, for the Trailmark podcast, the Lucas Vos podcast, Karen Wong’s The Meaning Code and for the Connectomics podcast of the Okinawa Institute. Some conference papers from 2024 include a talk on Ecological Philosophy for the International Philosophy Conference in Rome, for the European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment in Berlin, for the Cognitive Science Society at DUCOG, for the Modelling Cities workshop and the French Regional Conference on Complex Systems, for Livable Cities London, for Cities & Cultures in Barcelona, for the Radical Embodiment conference in Murcia, for the The Korean Society for the Philosophy of Science, and for the International Conference on Resilient Systems in Singapore, and early talks for the Modes of Existence in Oslo, at the Design Theory conferences at MINES in Paris, two talks for SEMF in Valencia, and for the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM).
Andrea has written about speed, transportation, landscape, memory, art, and other communal projects. Her work appears in numerous publications such as the New York Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Post, Bloomburg, Huffington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Business Insider, the National Geographic, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. She has also appeared in numerous films and podcasts. Through agencies and commissions, she has ghostwritten books and worked extensively for various museums, artists, collectors, and agencies.
Andrea wrote her undergraduate thesis on Rorty, Bohm and Hegel with Richard Dien Winfield. She did my Master thesis with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as part of the Doeller Lab at the Max Planck Institute, and with the Northoff Lab which is located at the University of Ottawa. In this thesis, Andrea set out the preliminaries of a philosophy and neuroscience of waymaking, perspectival hippocampus research, and metricizing the stimulus in scientific experimentation. It can be read here: Ecological Memory. Other early sketches were presented at the 8th MindBrainBody Symposium, the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference, as part of the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research Spring Academy, and at the Urban Forest Forest Urbanisms Conference.
Some recent publications can be found at My Liveable City and Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology Part One and Part Two at the Landesmuseum Hannover and in Discourse Magazine. Some talks in 2023 about way-making include: the Max Planck Institute’s 10th Mind Body Brain Symposium in Berlin, the 4th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Braga, Portugal, the Society of Cognitive Science of the Moving Image in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Pittsburgh, and Livable Cities at CUNY City Tech in New York City (slides), for the ISHPBB in Toronto (Talk on Stotz and Cognitive Symbiology), for the Cognitive Science Society in Australia, the Society for Multidisciplinary Research in Valencia and Madrid, for the Klinkum Heidelberg, and for the International Philosophy of Mind Conference. Andrea has also given talks for companies interested in applying this cognitive model to their business practices and is on the board of various companies internationally.
Ecological Motoring Initiative writings can be found on the EMI Substack. Those of you who are interested in the subjects of Desirable Unknown (nature, environment) please find further writings and community here. For those who want to go deeper into phenomenology & philosophy (via themes relative to the Love & Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy channel and the Way-making framework), join the secrete Substack Community Philosophy.
Love & Philosophy Research channel
Love and Philosophy Substack
