On building a career out of curiosity

What was your career like before Hello Ruby? Where did your interest in the different strands that came together in the book—coding, illustration, and writing—start for you?

I’m a kid of the 1990s, so computers have always been in my life. My father brought home what was then called a “laptop computer,” but really it was a draggable computer, something you had to push around. He said, “There’s nothing you can do with the computer that can’t be fixed or undone.” Which meant that we grew up with a very fearless attitude towards computers. I always loved creating little worlds with computers. It was like an evolution from Polly Pocket to Sim City to Hello Ruby — the idea that I can control an entire universe with my hands.

When it came time to think about what I would do when I grew up, I never for a moment considered computer science. For some reason, the world of technology or programming never clicked for me. I felt it was dull. It was removed from the world. It was intensely mathematical. It was the early 2000s in Finland, which was known for Nokia and the mobile phone boom, and I went to business school thinking that that’s what I would become: a middle manager, a business person at Nokia.

Then I was lucky enough to do an exchange at Stanford University. I did this mechanical engineering course that is legendary over there. It’s about getting gritty and building something with your hands. And I discovered this world of technology and startups, and this very optimistic Bay Area culture of the early 2010s. I started a nonprofit that taught women programming, because at the time I was rediscovering my childhood passion for creating things with computers. And then I ended up working in New York for a company that was democratizing coding education. So all of these trends came together.

How did you make space for drawing and writing while you were in business school, or thinking about integrating it into this career that might have been less creative?

I think we all have these curiosities that keep coming back to us. Often, ideas nag me for years before they actually become anything. It was the same with the Hello Ruby book series. It was something that I started when I was in Stanford, doing little doodles in the margins of my computer science books, and then it just gathered more ideas, like a snowball. It kept growing and growing and growing.

In very practical terms, in New York the Codecademy day started at around 10 A.M., so I would put an alarm clock on and use an hour in the morning to carve out time to do something new. It’s a learning curve every time you try out a new medium, so there needs to be enough time reserved for exploration and wondering and trying out new things. You need to have these folders in your head and gather a lot of ideas from a lot of different industries. With Hello Ruby, I spent a lot of time reading children’s books and looking at programming curriculums before jumping into illustrating it and making the book happen.

What gave you the desire, or even the confidence, to take it from an idea that was just for you and make it into a children’s book?

Sometimes I wished someone else would have done it. But the idea just kept coming back to me and saying, “No, wake up, you need to make it happen.”

I think the confidence came from the fact that I had a very unique perspective. Every single project I’ve been good at has been a very niche thing where my personal, subjective experience has been the thing that makes it work. I would be terrible at writing a K–12 curriculum for computer science, or writing a research paper on how to do urban planning for playgrounds. I’m always going for projects where it’s an asset that I have a single, curious viewpoint into the world. That’s where my confidence comes from — that no one else will have this same exact taste or the same exact view.

Hello Ruby is so whimsical. Everything in the world of computer science has a character, from GPUs and CPUs to the computer mouse. Did that idea arrive fully formed in your mind, or was it a more painstaking process of creating a narrative?

The character-driven idea came immediately. I’ve always had this very animistic sense of the world, where a lot of the things around me have a sense of agency and character—this almost Japanese sense that there are souls in the rocks and so forth. So in that sense it was very easy for me to anthropomorphize the concepts and ideas.

But even before the characters came to be, I started to think about how to make computer science more tactile. How can we make it more understandable with our fingers? That’s the way I explore new ideas. The little girl character, Ruby, was born because Ruby was the first programming language that I felt very comfortable expressing myself in, and every time I would run into a problem, like what is object-oriented programming or what is a linked list, I would do a little doodle of the Ruby character. But I think the most profound part of Hello Ruby is the fact that all these storybooks also have activities that help you explore computation for play or crafting or narration. That also came quite early on, because that’s the way I would have preferred to learn.

It seems like the playful or self-expressive side of technology is rarely part of computer science education. Why do you think that’s missing?

I think computer scientists love to stay in their heads, whereas when we are four years old, we explore the world with our fingers. Touch is missing from a lot of computer science curriculum, and touch is profound when we are learning.

We are so in love with the idea that you can just transfer knowledge from one person’s brain to another—this Matrix-like downloadable idea—that we forget that a lot of our learning happens through narrative, through context, through great educators. It’s not as linear a process as some technologists want to make it seem, especially in early childhood.

The final thing that is often missing in computer science education is reciprocity. Knowledge happens not in a transfer but together. As much as the educator is there to teach, the child is also there to teach.

There’s very little open-endedness in computer science curriculums. There’s project-based learning, but still, there are often rubrics that say that this is right or this is wrong, and there’s only one way of solving a problem. Whereas for me, the whole beauty and joy of computer science and programming is the fact that there are multiple ways of solving a problem and expressing yourself. Some of them are more elegant than others. But the teacher doesn’t need to be the person who transfers the knowledge. The student can bring their own experiences and ideas, and there’s constant reciprocity between the one who teaches and the one who learns.

So much of your work has centered around early childhood education. What drew you to that field?

I suppose the age I associate with most is four years old. Four is the pinnacle of life, when children are like philosopher kings. You can’t have a mundane conversation with a four-year-old or a six-year-old.

A lot of our foundations are laid in early childhood. I used to talk about a study that said that around the age of 12, people start to have these self-limiting ideas, for example whether they are math people or non-math people. But actually, there are more studies that say it happens even earlier. It’s around the age of six that kids start to say, “No, I’m not a person who can learn coding.” It’s such a pity, because kids around the age of six can be anything, but they start to self-define at that age already.

Hello Ruby was a real inflection point in your career. It’s been published around the world and translated into dozens of languages. How did things change for you after it was published? Did it set you on a new trajectory?

Absolutely. I wasn’t trained as a children’s book author. I didn’t belong in the industry. I still don’t think I do. But at least I have the credibility to be working on this now. I also recognize that it’s a huge privilege that I’ve been able to fund this work throughout the years. I know a lot of children’s book authors need to have a lot of different strategies to make a living.

Coming from this background of Silicon Valley and Stanford, I put a lot of pressure on myself. What does success look like? What do the next steps look like? Should I open a school? Should this be a big company that employs a lot of people? One of the choices I’m most proud of is that early on, I realized that what success looks like for me is freedom and curiosity and the ability to follow whatever path I take. A lot of the time, that’s not what building scalable companies looks like. For me, the past decade has been a very curiosity-led decade.

I don’t play a lot of video games, but I play Zelda and I only do the side quests. I’m not at all interested in completing the game. I just like meandering in the world and doing silly, mundane things, like collecting apples and learning to make all the recipes in the cooking side quest.

That sounds like the Platonic ideal of a creative life, being able to have a career that lets you go on those creative side quests.

A big part of it is that I’ve been able to talk about all of this. The way I funded a lot of my work is by doing speaking gigs. Books definitely don’t pay enough to sustain everything. I’ve been lucky in that technology companies are curious and interested in this. That’s something no one could have predicted in advance — that you can become a children’s book author who speaks about these topics for leadership at change management companies. Maybe that’s part of the curiosity: keeping your eyes open and mixing and matching things.

You’re now involved in playground design. The first one you helped design just opened in Finland. Tell me about your role in this project, and what you were aiming to bring to it.

The idea for the playground started with the second Hello Ruby book in 2016. I wanted to do an Alice in Wonderland-like book where Ruby falls inside the computer while trying to help the mouse find the missing cursor. The Computer History Museum had an exhibition where you could go inside this gigantic computer and learn how it works, and I thought it would be so cool to do something like that for a museum. I applied for funding but nothing really clicked.

Then, in 2020, early in the pandemic, playgrounds were the only thing that was open in Helsinki, and they became such a lifeline. I noticed that kids on the playground were doing these behaviors that I had always connected with the ideal school environment. They were self-directed, they were doing project-based learning, they were solving problems on their own. Grownups were there, but we were not on a podium telling them what they should be learning. That’s where the idea for the playground started.

There’s a long lineage of artists working with playgrounds. There’s Yinka Llori, a Nigerian-British artist, who created a playground in London. There’s Aldo van Eyck, who was also an architect, who created these very striking abstract playgrounds in postwar Amsterdam. There’s Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese-American artist, who created these intense and whimsical and abstract playgrounds. It’s an interesting place between public space and public art, and also very physical and very educational.

In Finland, we have another layer around playgrounds that is underutilized globally. We have the play structures, the actual physical things, and we put a lot of effort into thinking about how those play structures could mimic the ideas of computer science. That’s the “hardware” side of it. But then there’s the “software” side of playgrounds, which in Finland are run by playground instructors. They are often university-educated people whose sole task is to think about programs and educational content, for example for first-time mothers with small kids or for afterschool programs for nearby schools. That gave us a huge opportunity to think about pedagogical content and materials we could create for the park. I hope we start to see more pedagogical content being created around everyday neighborhood playgrounds.

You’ve found ways to write and draw as part of what you do for a living, but is there any creative outlet that you keep that’s just for you, that you do just for the joy of it?

Cooking, I think. It’s meditative. It happens on a daily basis. It creates a sense of community of familiarity. And it’s intensely creative. The best kind of cooking is when you have a fridge with five different things, and then you make something out of that — it’s the constraints.

I would never want to be a food influencer or turn that into something that influences my work publicly in any way. But almost everything else goes into those folders of ideas.

You’ve lived in Helsinki, New York, and now Paris. How did the cultures of those places influence your work, or the way you think about your work?

I absolutely think that place influences the way we see the world. When I was a young student in post-Nokia Helsinki, my options looked very different from when I was a student at Stanford or when I was an early-stage employee at a startup in New York. Helsinki gave me my personality and the unique vision of what I want to do and how I want to do things. Then New York gave me the permission to put those things together. I remember hearing people saying, “I’m a barista slash actress slash dog sitter,” and I’m like, “Oh, you can do that!” You can conjugate and add new ideas and identities to one another. In Finland, you’re allowed to be one thing — you’re either a teacher or a children’s book author or a playground maker.

I’m still figuring Paris out. But I think because Paris is such a historic city, and computer science and technology as a field is very uninterested in history, I’ve noticed myself being interested in where ideas come from and how they grow. Paris is a wonderful place to observe those ideas, because it’s so full of art and history. An engineering mindset clashes with the culture, which is more about thinking about things over the very long term, valuing art and taste, and being able to converse in many different disciplines as opposed to being narrowly very good at what you do.

What advice would you give to someone who would like a similar career to yours, or any career where they can translate all their different passions into something sustainable?

Pay attention to unlikely niches and unlikely combinations, and choose topics that accrue over time. There are certain disciplines where you need to be young or you need to be in a certain geographic location in order to succeed. It takes time to change education or write books, and I think my secret has been that I’ve always chosen projects that benefit from time as opposed to requiring a very fast execution. And the combinations can be very weird.

Philip Glass said that the legacy is not important, it’s the lineage. Who are the people who came before you? There’s no one who did exactly what I did, but there’s Björk, who combined nature and technology together, and there’s Tove Jansson from my native Finland, who built a beloved children’s brand around Moomins. There’s David Hockney, who has a deep curiosity around technology and perception. There are countless examples of people who have taken a certain path. Have a little hall of fame of those people. Thinking of your work as a continuation or a lineage of those people helps sustain you on the days when it gets tough.