Is there a curated list of university / industry labs working on “tools for thought” or “end user programming”? Basically tools that help people - gather & disseminate information, structure knowledge and create things! This would include things like - Muse, Coda, Notion, tools to explorable explanations, new programming languages & environments, rapid prototyping / end user tools, visual debuggers and observability, code walk through tools, github copilot, tools to create media (like 3blue1brown’s Manim engine), Information foraging & discovery tools (inciteful, connected papers, litmaps), etc

I would look at HCI (human-computer interaction labs), but honestly / arguably … a lot of computer science, data science, and information science research falls under this umbrella. Don’t forget about all the hidden / lower level inventions that needed to happen to let us dream of cool new tools / interfaces for thought!

"tools for thought" and "end user programming" are very very different things from an academic perspective

how so

how are they even similar? a paper and a pen is a great tool for thought, but have nothing to do with end-user programming. and programming a Lego Mindstorm robot is done by an end-user, but has nothing to do with being a tool for thought. Using one to facilitate the other is an explicit choice, and should be a conscious and well-reasoned decision.

yeah I guess these days its fashionable to focus ‘tools of thought’ to ‘computational tools of thought’, but you’re right that the framing there is too specific

These days, "tools for thought" is popularly used to refer to all the Roam-likes, even though they hardly cover a sliver of the original meaning of the term.

How come https://www.inkandswitch.com/ didn't come up in the replies? 😄