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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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a lot of calipers do have data pin outs, including some that hide it under a plastic shell you can cut open (if they're on the PCB itself, google it to check if yours might)
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It's been interesting to see specialised input devices for photogs working in Lightroom etc. arrive into "affordable" territory in the last couple of years. (Pro movie stuff has had it for longer, but £££££.)