I make things.

Whether it’s a global IT architecture or something on the bench in my workshop, the idea behind it is the same. I take something that doesn’t exist yet and figure out how to make it real, properly, down to the details most people never notice. That’s most of it. The rest is just which material I happen to be holding.

I’m not loyal to any one craft. Metal, leather, wood, electronics, code. They’re all just ways to get an idea out of my head and into something that works. My favourite projects are the ones that won’t stay in a single discipline: a leather bag that starts out as a 3D-printed mould, a wood-fired grill built to burn its own smoke, a car with a computer wired into it. I like the moment where a bunch of unrelated things are made to work together.

I get to do a version of this for a living too. By profession I’m an enterprise architect, and I usually get handed the big, messy problems that don’t have an obvious owner. Work is the high-stakes version: real consequences, a lot of people involved, and the best idea in the world is worth nothing until the team and the organisation are behind it. The workshop is the low-stakes version, where the only person I have to convince is me, and the worst that can happen is a ruined piece of steel. Maker first. The job is just one of the places I do it.

I moved away from home at sixteen to study classical ballet abroad, and spent the years after that moving around the world for work. For a long time I had nowhere proper to build things, which is why some of my early larger projects like the Carputer had to be put together in my dad’s garage in Finland. Eventually I got a workshop of my own, and it’s been making up for lost time ever since. All sorts of things come out of it now: welded frames, electronics that measure things nobody asked to have measured, leather goods I’m new enough at that you should count my experience in months, and every now and then a bit of woodworking I seem to produce by accident.

Anything can be made, and you might as well make it yourself

A lot of it is for the kids. There’s an electric trike I rebuilt from a second-hand mobility scooter, and a soapbox car the trike can tow to the start line as its own service vehicle. There’s a triple bunk bed they waited a whole year for. The neighbourhood is a little less quiet than it used to be.

Most of the real building happens late. The day belongs to a screen, so the workshop gets the evenings and the small hours. There’s a Finnish word, kaamos, for the polar night, the part of winter when the sun doesn’t bother to show up. It felt like the right name for work that gets done in the dark. Kuolema korjaa univelat. The owl approves.

I didn’t get here in a straight line. As a kid I followed my dad around everything he built, handing him tools and holding things in place, and somewhere in there I picked up the way he thought: that anything can be made, and you might as well make it yourself. We built a playhouse together, ten metres tall on four square metres of floor, and I insisted on sleeping in it every summer. I think I had the whole mindset before I had the words for it.

Much later I danced professionally for about a decade, and the whole time I kept doing design work on the side, just because I found it interesting. Sometimes someone even paid me. One of my logos is, as far as I know, still tattooed on a stranger’s ankle. The dancing took me to some strange places: a couple of state visits, the coronation of the king of Bhutan, and a fair amount of work alongside the Queen of Denmark. The graphic-design work in the military, and then the IT career, came after.

None of that is really the point. It’s just the road that produced the guy currently covered in leather dye.