And unfortunately it's almost all limited to actual programmers. People who use the computer as a tool for other purposes, like say image manipulation or data analysis without coding... they haven't been able to design/customize/evolve/innovate their own tool environments much
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Actually it's worse: it's not even just programmers. Even most experienced programmers aren't deep in enough to do more than say customize emacs or their IDE. The actual evolution is driven by programmers' programmers -- systems programmers.
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Like Git, arguably the biggest innovation in producer-side UI/UX, is a programmer's shop tool built by the ultimate programmers' programmer, Linus Torvalds. These people use computers for one very narrow kind of production work: making better computers.
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We need Linus Torvalds level people trying to think up better, broader producer-side systemic UX metaphors. Like a "workshop" or "kitchen" or "lab" metaphor for the computer.
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And I'm thinking here mainly of full-fledged ones, like a laptop or desktop, but also for phones and tablets and voice-control devices.
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There is some decent sci-fi inspiration for this. Iron Man's Jarvis is probably my favorite.
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Jarvis is a voice assistant metaphor, but has the skills of an extremely capable lab assistant/tech or shop machinist (gender aside: he's a male voice, unlike most voice assistants, who are descended from office secretaries and have female voices)
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But Jarvis is not quite right, since he's a digital assistant for a primarily *physical* space, and controls robot arms and prototyping areas and stuff. We need Jarvis-grade expressivity for *digital* environments.
Like think a massively more powerful Clippy that actually works
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This train of thought started with me organizing my home office into a sort of lab-maker space. The project crept up on me, but once I realized I was doing it, it was easy.
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Thinking about desks I've had over the years. I had an actual L-shaped desk for home office for several years (I think 2004-09) and 2 cheap desks in L-config for several more years. Single desk for the last year. Now going back to L with a twist: second leg will be a workbench.
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A workspace designed for writing and consulting is very simple. Just a desk, a laptop, room for some papers, maybe a whiteboard, a bookshelf with commonly referred to books within reach. Maybe a mic/video rig if you do podcasting and stuff.
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It's also very different in very obvious ways from a space where you can do simple repairs, mechanical/electronics projects/soldering etc. Once I realized I was headed in this direction, the decisions were obvious:
Replying to
1. What kind of workbench to get,
2. Where to put a 3d printer
3. How to hold work (small desk vise?)
4. How to store small parts
5. How to ventilate work area
6. Creating enough length for an optics project
Then I thought... hmm what would a lab *computer* look like?
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And here I realized I had *no idea* ... my first thought was "maybe I should build my own computer" but though that might be a fun project, it's not actually salient to what it means to have a "lab computer."
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Back when I was teaching an undergrad lab course as a grad student, a "lab computer" meant a regular PC with a data acquisition/control board attached and some instrumentation software for the students to do their experiments. There were programs like LabView, LabTech etc.
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The "lab" part of the computer was basically some applications that talked to some extra hardware. In some cases, integrating with more ordinary software. Like dSpace boards integrated with Matlab.
But this is not a "lab computer" really in the sense I mean it.
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I'm talking about a computer organized well for all the soft workflows made necessary by the work. For example. Astrophotography demands an image processing stack. 3d printing demands a CAD stack. What's a computer properly organized around these things like?
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They used to call these "engineering workstations" but that basically meant "lots of power" not a different UX paradigm. One of the first computers I got to play with was an early Silicon Graphics workstation at my dad's office in like 1990.
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It was *way* more powerful than the 386 PCs at my school. But the only thing I could *do* with it was admire some pretty 3d models with rendered reflective surfaces etc. It didn't have a significantly different UX paradigm to encourage immediate tinkering like a physical lab does
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These things evolved in Sun and DEC Alpha workstations and later model SG machines through the 90s until they kinda died out in the early 2000s. They were replaced by basic PCs with commodity hardware and OSes. They simply didn't add enough differentiated "producer UX" value.
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When I got my first laptop in 2000 (a Dell Inspiron) I switched from Unix to Windows for all my research work and never looked back. Unlike programmers, I only really needed Matlab and LaTeX, both of which ran fine on Windows, and the processing power was more than enough for me
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It's a sad story... that the computer as a producer device basically died with the Sun workstation, but it kinda deserved to, since it didn't evolve at all, except for computer scientists themselves. If you were any other kind of scientist or engineer, you were a consumer
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Back to today. The only people I know of who do the kind of things I think should be done are the extreme hackers building their own from-scratch home-automation hardware to Jarvis-up their workspaces. has one... but note he's a CS PhD :D
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If you're say, an astronomer or a biologist, or a virologist researching Covid19 vaccines, you're out of luck. Your computer is basically a consumption tool designed for binge-watching videos and playing games. Just with some of your software loaded on.
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Imagine if say automobiles evolved that. ONLY automotive engineers would have anything other than a basic family sedan. If you were a construction worker or farmer, you couldn't get a pickup truck designed with your needs in mind.
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You'd have to either learn as much about cars as a Ford engineer, and then you could only get a forklift truck designed for working within automobile factories.
Farmers having to choose between a Toyota Prius or a forklift truck. No F150s or cybertrucks around.
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Some of this thread assumes a false digital dualist paradigm of a space of digital workflows and a space of physical workflows. Obviously, this can be broken/pushed. I do like some aspects of Bret Victor's thinking here (the dynamicland stuff)
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Replying to @vgr
Maybe the best computer "workshop" is the place where your home workshop itself is a computer—the pattern encompasses both the software-as-place metaphor and the space itself where the software is used. Screens are the constraint. twitter.com/kev_mcg/status
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This is a paradigm of the workspace as a single entity, with both physical and virtual elements embodied by a single space, like a room. This in my account would be like Jarvis getting overloaded into a non-dualist assistant computer who doesn't hide the digital world.
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Something about this direction feels a bit wrong to me though. The problem I describe would exist even if everything you did was information based, and you didn't need any physical stuff at all.
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While a work-UX that encompasses say physical whiteboards, tabletops, lab equipment, soldering stations etc. all as part of the (notional or real) "computer" is an interesting direction, but a bit totalizing for me. But there's something there for sure.
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I was not familiar with this body of literature, nice... I only read random historical/biographical snippets.
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Replying to @vgr
On the off-chance you aren't familiar, there's a lovely corner of STS/ethnography about tool-building culture of science and its role epistemologically and otherwise (e.g. amazon.com/gp/product/022, amazon.com/dp/0804727864, amazon.com/dp/0226136787, tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.120).
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BTW, though I've framed this as a UX type problem, it isn't really. It's basically a macroeconomic problem. Consumerization as a 130 year old historical trend (I date it to 1890 when the home stopped also being a workshop) needs to gives way to high-tech neo-producerism
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I'm very wary of what someone aptly dubbed techwashed pastoralism, so I don't producerism in the older Thomas Jefferson sense or the wood-working-with-hand-tools sense. I'm talking replacing consumer culture with last-mile circular economies, 100% full-lifecycle ownership etc.
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In this context, the home/life as a producer space isn't a sort of waldenponding for NPC maker-doers. It's sort of a thick-client for the cloudy infrastructure world that is a big part of creating a more sustainable material economy.
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Like, one reason I'm experimenting with all this stuff is what I think of as "stack research." Just how much more sustainable/low-carbon could the world get if the home were a locus of repair, making, circular-local trading etc. Not just consumption?
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I’ll close with a picture of these calipers that just arrived from amazon. I find myself asking 2 questions:
1. Where will it live physically?
2. It’s already digital unlike calipers I used in high school in 1989. Why can’t I NFC measurements directly into a spreadsheet? 😡
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Ooh! Beyond my budget, but will put on my lab wishlist for future...
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Replying to @vgr
They make those:
amazon.com/Fowler-54-100-
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