About:
my philosophy

My name is Aki, and occasionally, I describe myself as a recovering technologist. While I was educated in the arts and the humanities, I have worked for the last three decades in technology-related contexts, bridging research into design and innovation, across business and academia. Around the time I turned 50, I had a set of profound experiences that transformed my worldview.

Since then, I have been on a personal path of ‘soulcraft’, to use Bill Plotkin’s terminology. I have shed the secular, somewhat adolescent and entrepreneurial ambitions that swept me away from my humanist roots. I hesitate to say that I have yet hatched as a butterfly, but I have cocooned long enough to begin sharing the inspirations and ways forward that have made me a better parent and partner, and more in tune with nature.

Reclaiming my attention was the first step, and it is a constant work in progress. However, as part of the cocooning phase, I have found calm and inner peace, and a renewed sense of purpose. With that, I would like to think I can guide others to take steps towards the same place.

Inside my cocoon, I have attended tens of talks, read tens of books and articles, and joined online communities that share the growing unease about the matter of things today: the metacrisis — a structure of feeling underlying the multiple crises, environmental, geopolitical, socio-economical, wellbeing — facing the planet. Yet, the debates and communities I have engaged with have something in common: they have been about finding ways to regrow living local cultures and to connect with skills and practices forgotten (such as growing one’s own food). The aim is to build towards a new civilisation, even if the journey there, ‘the great simplification’, would involve ruins, suffering, and loss.

My unique contribution to those efforts stems from three decades of experience in various roles in work cultures across Europe and the US. I have built strong expertise in facilitating creative outputs in complex contexts and helping people make decisions. Now, I want to lend the experience into remaking our world into one that is worth living for, for both humans and the more-than-human world.

You’ll find here my influences in the essays, and my services explained (that I mostly offer on a voluntary basis), and eventually an outline of my book project. Thank you for your attention.

With love and kindness,