Not a physical one — though I do have those too, full of tinkering parts, bobs, and bits. This box lives in my head and on random pieces of paper, scribbled in notebooks. It’s full of ideas that I’ve been collecting since my early twenties — inventions, systems, frameworks, solutions to problems that nobody around me seemed to be talking about yet or have talked about, but only in passing

Systemic education reform. Disaster communication hardware. Flood survival tools built for every day people. Multi-scenario disaster preparedness game to gamify education. Immersive events that spark behavioural change

Every time I shared one, I got the same response: “Interesting but the tech isn’t available.” Or “It is impossible and even if it is, it will be too expensive”

So I kept collecting and I kept moving

I’ve been called a generalist. A person with my head in the clouds

Someone without a traditional resume. Undesirable to the corporate hire

They weren’t entirely wrong, although for an embarrassingly long time, I allowed them to convince me of my “lack”. Heck, I thought I was broken and unworthy of good things!

The rejection and negative opinions dressed up as care used to weigh on me until I decided that I’ll just have to build the things I want to see in this world by hook or by crook. My ability to connect dots across domains that work in silos were not flaws in my system, but rather they were the whole damned point

I’m a college dropout from an education system that wasn’t built for a brain like mine. Without realising it, I’ve built education in a way that worked for me, including a Masters programme that I’ve recently created for myself tailored to my style of learning. Instead of a degree, I built my education through experience — traveling across Cambodia visiting orphanages and schools, teaching English at a rural farm in Laos, building wells in remote villages, documenting an urban slum in Bangkok and the internally displaced people in the conflict zone in Kachin, installing water filtration systems in rural Borneo for the Iban and Penan tribes

Then the disasters came and I ran toward them

Floods across Malaysia. Typhoon Haiyan. The twin Nepal earthquakes. I spent years in the field, in the mud, in communities that had lost everything — their homes, their livelihoods, and sometimes the irreplaceable things: the stories, memories, historical architecture and artefacts, items that held meaning and cultural significance. The Philippines gave me a diplomatic visa because of my work in the field. Subsequently I was also the only Malaysian youth invited to the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul and to the Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Delhi. I was also accepted into the Japan Foundation’s inaugural project called HANDs Project for Disaster Preparedness with creators and builders from across Asia. We travelled through 4 countries to study how disasters affected not just the land, but the communities, and how different systems rebuilt in varying degrees of disparities

The fellowship was where I designed the multi-scenario game for disaster preparedness to which our advisor, in all his enthusiasm at the end of my presentation said “WE NEED TO FUND THIS! It covers everything we need for preparedness!” but alas, the budget couldn’t cover the cost of building out a whole game. That was a little over 10 years ago and technology has advanced in leaps and bounds so much so that maybe, just maybe it costs a lot less now to build a game app

But I digress

Here’s what I kept seeing in the field, across every disaster, every community, every country:

The world’s most urgent problems don’t wait for specialists

When a typhoon destroys a coastal village, nobody has time to wait for the right academic discipline to show up. When ancient architecture is deliberately targeted in a conflict zone, no formal institution moves fast enough to preserve what’s lost. When a community builds a brilliant, locally-made solution to a problem, they aren’t celebrated the way the media hypes up an unnecessary tech-bro invention

I cannot help but ask why

I saw indigenous knowledge systems that held centuries of wisdom about living regeneratively with land and water — wisdom that climate scientists and urban designers are only now beginning to catch up to. I saw grassroots inventors building solutions in their shanty shacks and backyards that no Silicon Valley startup would ever think to build, because they were solving problems Silicon Valley has never experienced. And I saw culture and heritage disappearing — erased by war, toppled by earthquakes, rewritten by those with their own agenda

I felt the urgency of all of this in my bones and I had a box full of impossibly possible ideas and solutions to explore when the time was right

So I bid my time exposing myself to new skills, expanding my perception of the world because I knew that there is so much that I have yet to learn. I had no hubris of my knowledge and capacities, only a world full of ideas and an undaunted curiosity about complex systems, new innovations, human behaviour, and the nuances that colour every aspect of life, manmade or otherwise

Fast forward till now

6 months ago I set out to build The Curious Tinkerer’s Lair while utilising a small space in the Land Rover restoration workshop as my own little Tinkering Lab. I have minimal resources and a whole lot of grit. This Substack is where I finally bring these threads together in public — and where I build toward a documentary series documenting the makers, wisdom keepers, and grassroots innovators building resilience on their own terms

Some of what I share here will be field notes from communities I visit. Some will be deep dives into ideas that were once called too futuristic. Many of what I write about will be my imperfect scrappy learn-as-I-go share-as-I-go experiences. Some will be honest reflections on what it looks like to build something from scratch, without a safety net, as someone who has spent their whole life doing exactly that

I want to elevate voices and ideas that are often overlooked, brushed aside by Western capitalistic perspectives

I also want to build an intentional community of builders, tinkerers who possess the courage to build outside of convention

The long game is a physical Tinkering Lab, or dare I dream, multiple Labs across the world — a space for makers, storytellers, innovators, and community builders to come together to build towards a better world. Not a Silicon Valley incubator. Not an academic research centre. Something scrappier, warmer, and more urgent than either of those

This is where that journey begins

If you’ve ever been told your thinking is too scattered, your path too unconventional, your ideas too early, if you care about the communities and cultures this world is losing too fast and too quietly, if you believe the best solutions to the world’s hardest problems might come from a scrappy backyard in Bangladesh, a workshop in rural Laos, or a box of ideas that’s been waiting fifteen years to be opened, you’re definitely in the right place

Welcome to the Lair

Let’s tinker together

Now I want to hear from you. What's an idea you've been sitting on, the curiosity you haven't had space to chase yet? Tell me in the comments — I'd genuinely love to know

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