Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:42:17 -0600The Print Shop

A friend on the fediverse asked me a very good question during a discussion about work, and the problems of doing quality work when you're abstracted-away from the people who actually need and use the things you make:

This seemed like a question that I should have an immediate answer for, but I no longer do.  The reason is that so many of the things I would have responded with have been well... enshitified, and while I could try to do unshitified work in these areas, I don't think I could escape the gravity well of the enshitifiers, especially if I were doing so in the sort of professional or commercial setting necessary for it to be a way to make a living.

I spent almost a week thinking about this before I had any new ideas.  

During that time I worked on other things and tried to pay attention to what I enjoyed doing that wasn't squarely in the cross-hairs of enshitification.  The activity that stood-out was spending time at The KGLMPS, designing things to print and working on the machines.

During this time I talked to a number of friends who have complemented the design and fabrication work that Jamie and I have done together, much of it involving 3D printing but including related work as well with electronics and such to produce decorative items, furniture, props, etc.  Some of these friends have purchased some of the things we've created and others have commissioned us to help them produce things of their own design, desire or interest.

All this got me thinking that maybe this is the answer to my friend's question about work.  But what exactly is "this"?

You could call it "3D printing", but I don't think that's it.  It's not only an oversimplification, but saying "I want to be a professional 3D printer" doesn't convey the range of design, engineering, testing and finishing that goes into this work.  It often includes elements of drafting, CAD, CAM, mechanical, software and electrical engineering..  I think it also limits the imagination of people who I'd like to work with because I wouldn't want them to think we could only realize things through a single process.

So what I need to think of is a name for the service of helping produce something someone wants or needs, with a narrow enough scope to limit it to things we can enjoy producing but wide enough to let people's imagination run wild enough to get excited about what we can do.  I want to find a term for this that conveys the excitement, the creativity and the collaborative nature of what we do as well.  I also want to frame it in such a way as to make it clear that it's a dynamic thing, something that can't really be captured and enshittified.  If the process becomes something that can be turned into something that doesn't require creativity and care then it's not something we'd likely continue to do.

I'm not sure what to call it, but I'm sure that it happens to fit-in with what we've stared at KGLMPS.  This could be a coincidence or it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but regardless of what you call it I think it's awesome.

We're going to be on a little trip for the next week or so and one of the things I'm going to noodle-on while in new, stimulating environments is what the next step looks like along this path.  When we return I plan to start implementing whatever we manage to come-up with.