I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.

Robin Sloan writes about being frustrated by the startup generation’s love of toolsmithery. Or rather: their recurring commitment to selling services.

Now, I know that I’m a toolsmith – but I only really make tools for myself. Some of them are on github; some are not even there, either because they’re just so bespoke or so useless. Some I use daily; some I barely use at all. Regardless, I wouldn’t sell them to anybody.

But I thought about the article, and ruminated, and my best comeback is: blessed are the toymakers.

If you can make a tool, you can make a toy. The common output of workshop apprenticeships were both tools to be put to use, but also toys or knick-knacks to demonstrate and practice skills.

I love making toys. Little mechanical things, to be fiddled with, to be explored, created with purpose and intent and intended to express an idea. Most of my borderline-nonsense Twitter bots are just that: toys I wanted to play with. One of them lived for an hour before I decided it was so rubbish I wasn’t letting it out in public for a while. Some of them have lasted a very long while and have a great many followers.

The best toys have hidden depths. The best toys are all super-simple on the surface; super-obvious. They let you know exactly what you ought to try doing with them. But as you explore them, you discover they have hidden depths. And: hidden affordances. Spaces for imagination to rush in. Toys allow you to play games, inventing rules that make the toy more fun, not less. Toys allow you to tell the stories you imagine, not that are baked into them.

As Matt Jones said in his his Interesting 2007 talk – “stories are the contrails that toys leave as they roar through our world and our imaginations“. It’s one of my favourite Jones-isms. I’ve been returning to that notion a lot, recently.

Toys demand fiddling with: they invite interrogation through hands and messing around. And they can be disposable: if they’re no good, make another.

The toys my Dad made for me were wooden. The toys I make – for myself, for friends, to make a joke real – are digital. But they’re there, and they all come down to an odd idea I wanted to explore, or a joke I wanted to make real. They are not vague ideas, tweeted and then forgotten about, tossed to the wind in a meeting, or imagined up but never created. They work, they’re real. No smoke and mirrors here – but no Great Purpose either, no business model. Just something fun, something interesting, to scratch an itch, to see if it’s fun in your hand.

I make toys to find out what’s interesting, to explore what’s next.

Reading Robin’s post, I came to agree with him. After all, I’m a staunch believer in the whole “Liberal Arts 2.0” idea; I’m one of those humanities graduates who learned to code.

Why not put technological skills to use making art (as I argued at Culture Hack Day)? Go one step further: rather than putting technology to use serving existing media – the books and films that Robin talks about – why not just invent new forms of media, as Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall describe? The new liberal arts are not on the edge of something big; they are on many edges, all at once. We get to decide where they tip over into; what’s at the bottom of those cliff-faces. Maybe those media will have the tiny audiences Sloan describes; maybe they’ll become huge. But we get to decide, and right now, there is space to play, and a need for those of us with weird skillsets – technological hands and flighty, artistic brains, or vice versa, ‘consecutive or concurrent’ – to go explore.

Inventing media is a big job. We could start by making toys.

I’m really bored of the term “3D printer”.

It’s begun to make me squirm when I hear it. For many such devices, it’s a reasonable explanation of the process – layers of extruded material “printed”, a layer at time, building an object up from nothing.

My problem is with the “3D” part of it. Or rather: the idea that a “3D printer” prints… 3Ds? I read an article explaining the technology in a mainstream newspaper; it explained that at the end of the process, you’d remove your “3D artefact” from the machine.

Or, you know, object. Thing. Or even call it by the name of what you’ve printed: “when the printer finished, I removed my ashtray/cog/bottle opener/toy.”

I’ve just finished Charlie Stross’ Rule 34, which was fun. One of my favourite pieces of futurethinking in it was his exploration of the domestication of “fabbers”. They’re not things owned only by geeks and early adopters; Stross’ fabbers are bought in John Lewis, made by mainstream companies. Of course, like Nespresso machines or inkjet printers, they’re artificially hobbled to only use ‘official’ feedstock, and perhaps even to not make certain plans (ie, forcing you into a “thing store” to download official plans). So the opportunity for hackers are to take the off-the-shelf machines and rewire them to use illicit feedstock, to make dangerous things. But the fabber is very much just like a coffee machine in this universe, and I liked some of his explorations of what it was like to have an off-the-shelf object printer in the house.

A name like “object printer” or “thing printer” feels so much more honest and less clumsy. And: eventually we’re going to get over the magic of the “3D” part of the printing, and instead just focus on the variety of things we can get out, the varieties of materials we can print in, the affordability of such devices. The 3Dness will be taken as given.

(If you pushed me, and I had to coin a neologism, though, I’d choose artefactory.)