I’ve been making a lot of things recently, both at work and at home. And as a result, I’ve been having to buy tools.

Not a lot, but a steady trickle: discovering I need one of these, or one of those. A box of screws or bolts here; some wire there; a different kind of this to fit a particular need.

I’m trying to artificially acquire odds and ends.

This is hard. What, I think, I’ve been needing is a workshop.

But you can’t buy a workshop. A workshop isn’t a set of tools in a room.

It’s everything else, as well: offcuts; spares; old bits of wood; weird bits of plastic with strange holes in; broken things with one useful part to be cannibalised; hand-made jigs that fit particular things.

There is no shelf in B&Q or Maplin marked “this, that, and the other“, and yet that – more than anything else – is what I’ve been needing recently.

You can’t buy leftovers, spares, or “just the right thing”.

And given that, I think a workshop isn’t measured in the volume of tools it contains, the number of shelves, or the lengths of its benches.

I think it’s measured as a duration. A one-year workshop. A five-year workshop. A ten-year workshop.

Ten years of making things, and ten years of all the entropy that goes along with that: spares, duplicates, improved versions of things, swarf, offcuts, and thingummys.

When you view it like that, it’s no wonder I’m always finding new things I’ll require. I’ve only got a baby workshop (and let’s face it, the tools are in a closet and I’m drilling and sawing things on my dining room table – it’s hardly a workshop, is it?)

But babies grow up.

And it’s a reminder why, when I visit my parents, I can almost always find the bits and bobs I need, or the right tool for a job, or a part I didn’t even know the name of – because there’s a thirty-year workshop waiting for me.

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.)