John Davidson

Hi, I'm John Davidson. I'm a software product manager in Seattle. For years, I built things constantly—furniture, software, welded sculpture, quilts—but never thought of myself as creative.

A couple of years ago, that started to shift. I realized that the problem-solving I love—figuring out how to bend steel into a trefoil knot, how to dye yarn the exact right blue, how to match the vision in my head with the realities of the physical world—that IS creativity. I'm an autodidact. I have ideas and I learn how to make them real mostly through trial and error and obsessive tinkering.

I studied geography in college, and place still makes sense to me as a way of understanding things. Place is the unseen driver of what we create and how we create it. It introduces constraints, mindset, ethos. It puts you near other people who think like you. My wife says I'm a creature in my native habitat here in Seattle, and she's right. The dampness, the moss, the darkness—I embrace it. Some of my work reflects that. Some of it rebels against it. Some of it's just there to make me happy.

I'm always making something. Not all of it ends up here, but I'm putting the work out into the world because that's how art works—someone else might see it and get inspired, or just enjoy it, or understand something they didn't before.