Episode #10
Linda Liukas - On Legibility, Permission and the Audacity to Dream Big
In this tenth episode of AVANTO, Linda Liukas speaks from Paris, where she has lived for the past five years. For more than a decade, she has been making computing legible to children.She is the author and illustrator of the Hello Ruby books, published in close to forty languages, and the co-founder of Rails Girls. She now builds playgrounds: public infrastructure that makes technology physical and is designed to last for twenty years. Across books, workshops and public spaces, her work returns to the same question: what makes people feel that a subject belongs to them, and that they are allowed to touch it, question it and build with it? The conversation asks whether the same applies to a country. Finland can be excellent and still hard to read from the outside, because much of what defines it is carried in context that outsiders do not automatically share. It moves from why adults answer a curious child with “it’s magic” or “it’s too complicated”, to the permission Linda found at Stanford to aim higher, and to the deliberate choices Finland made in the 1960s to raise its own ceiling. She names Finnish assets that rarely appear in any pitch, including an openness of access that a large country cannot afford: “In Finland you're always one email away from someone.” She also examines what Finland may have lost or undervalued along the way: an education that does not always teach people to articulate and trust their own judgement, an engineering culture built on dependability that may have lost some of its audacity, and the difficulty of making a complex country legible without flattening it into one thing. It closes on a proposition Finland has never put on the table, and on what Linda hopes for the children who first discovered Hello Ruby more than a decade ago. A long-form conversation about Finland's global ambition. Why a country with world-class technology, trusted institutions and exceptional talent still struggles to build companies that shape the world on its own terms.
