The pleasure of making things

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately building and modifying mechanical keyboards. I’ve experimented with switches, keycaps, springs, layouts, and lighting. I’ve taken keyboards that were perfectly functional and changed them, sometimes repeatedly, until they looked, felt, and sounded the way I wanted. Then I’ve given most of them away. There’s a Tibetan Buddhist tradition of creating elaborate mandalas from colored sand. The monks spend days or weeks painstakingly arranging the grains into intricate patterns. When the work is complete, they deliberately destroy it, sweeping the sand together. The destruction isn’t an accident or a tragedy. It’s part of the process. The practice is intended, in part, to illustrate the impermanence of things. I’m not going to claim that my keyboard hobby has the spiritual significance of a Tibetan sand mandala, but I see a parallel. Designing a keyboard is more complicated than it might appear. There are at least four dimensions to consider: sight,…

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