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Traditionally, craft was constituted by materials, techniques, function, and lineage. Romantic notions about the “human imprint” (Mazanti, 2011, p. 61) and craft’s authenticity continue to pervade the material culture. Scholars like Louise Mazanti and Glenn Adamson approach craft as a discourse and material position capable of reflexive change and transformation (Adamson, 2010, 2013; Mazanti, 2011). In this light, craft expands beyond the reaches of regional tradition, limited materials, and the touch of the hand to include 3D printed ceramics, LED-ridden textiles, and virtual showrooms. Given the rise of three-dimensional modeling, rapid prototyping, and haptic-digital controls, craft has gone digital.

The relationship between craft and digital fields is often positioned as antithetical, even binary, as craft was defined as “anti-technological” since the Arts and Crafts movement (Greenhalgh, 2002, p. 7). Just as our crafting ancestors confronted the changing landscape of mass production, contemporary issues between the handmade and digital exist on a continuum. In order for scholars to better analyze the contemporary work of cultural producers, for educators to equip and prepare future makers, and to expand the ways in which material production is entangled within economic and social frameworks, we must interrogate the affinities between craft and the digital.

Positioning traditional craft and computers as antagonistic oversimplifies and dehumanizes both; physical and digital craft discourses are non-binary. While craft literature situates local craft as being separate from, or better than, mass-produced goods (a handy pseudonym for machine-produced), most writers problematize the agency and humanity of the workers considered “replaceable parts in a bureaucracy” within capitalism (Greenhalgh, 2002, p. 16). Moreover, craft industries, even cottage industries, exist within a capitalist, global market, consuming materials from conglomerates they profess to oppose.

The labor of traditional craftspeople and those producing digital products ought not to be siloed but considered in relation to one another. Positioning digital labor as separate from “handmaking” rejects the historical, physical, and immaterial labor inherent in digital work, denying agency to workers behind the creation, maintenance, and operation of digital technologies. Simply put, the use of machines in production does not remove humans from labor consideration. As ←22 | 23→artist Allison Smith so aptly put it, “We forget that even today Nikes are made by workers. We [in craft] tend to think of mass-produced ‘machine-made’ things as if they’re totally devoid of human hands and workmanship, but the machines are making these things; people are making these things” (Smith, 2010, p. 624). We can easily substitute “computer,” “tablet,” or “VR headset,” for “Nike,” but the sentiment remains; all production includes human labor.

Beyond labor, physical and digital craft discourses share linguistic and technical similarities. Even the term digital can refer “not only to the information, virtual realm of ones and zeros but also to the fingers—those physical manual extensions that apprehend the world” (Bratich, 2010, p. 303). Furthermore, as Heidegger (by way of Bratich) reminds us, our metaphors for understanding and comprehending, like grasping, sorting, feeling, “depend on a hand with its digits” (Bratich, 2010, p. 303). Even within the virtual sphere, our digits connect us to virtual engagements.

The digital, however, is only one part of the digital-handicraft method we will outline, and we must re-examine our understanding of the word “craft” itself to move beyond stagnant definitions. Alexander Langland’s (2018) text Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, posits the Old English craeft is nearly untranslatable, but “a form of knowledge, not just a knowledge of making but a knowledge of being [it combines] skill, intelligence and virtue” (2018, p. 16). Although the German equivalent, kraft, is often translated as power, one might interpret power to be potential or ability, rather than force or might. The idea of craft, here, is easily applied to a number of forms of knowledge with potential, like witchcraft, wildcraft, and spycraft (Bratich, 2010), and now, with our addition, digital-handicraft.

Much of the evolution of the digital sphere was influenced or impacted by handiwork, such as the Jacquard loom influencing Ada Lovelace’s vision of early algorithms, or similarities between fiber’s binary systems (like the knit/purl of knitting) and those of binary code (Lovelace & Toole, 1998). Even “digital images” echo craft, “constantly woven and rewoven in their on-screen performativity” (Monteiro, 2017, p. 59). We refer to virtual spaces as constructed or built, using the metaphors of physical labor to explain dematerialized constructs. Finally, the common touch gestures of the virtual field, like moving and clicking a computer mouse or swiping a mobile device, are learned and practiced gestures that quickly become second nature, similar to many repeated gestures within craft, like casting on (in knitting or crochet) or tapering in metallurgy.

This last connection—the similarities in touch gestures and the feedback loops they produce—drives us to reconsider both digital and physical handicraft as overlapping and influencing, rather than mutually exclusive. If we conceive craft and digital to refer simultaneously to our comprehension, extension, knowledge, and potential within the material and virtual space, informed by external systems, touch gestures, and techné, what might emerge as spaces for potential growth?

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Craft is often defined by a maker’s tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to a way of knowing, the kind of knowledge we often neglect to analyze or articulate until, particularly in craft, we are asked to teach the skill to another. The struggle to communicate the bodily knowledge that knows when the clay is centered, when the glass is properly roughed out, or the stitch complete, influences physical craft’s educational models. Mentor-apprentice relationships, communal workshop models, or marketplace demonstrations all depend on the physical presence of an instructor to adequately communicate that which cannot be verbally articulated.

Contemporary technologies like Periscope, Instagram, and Snapchat offer viewers a uniquely hands-free, hands-on approach where instructors utilize the mobility of handheld video devices to substitute for their physical presence. Periscope is so successful, it seems, at facilitating a “life-like” studio environment, complete with an energetic instructor, that a “Potters of Periscope” (https://www.pscp.tv/PottersOnScope) community has emerged in recent years, increasing connection, and sales, for potters like Michael Kline, Virgil Ortiz, and others (https://cfileonline.org/selling-ceramics-on-mobile/).

Much of craft’s mythology resides in this understanding of tacit knowledge. Think of truisms about the hand of the maker, making it look easy, or referring to years of accumulated skill as second nature or talent. We see similar sentiments by those admiring digital tacit skill. To conflate digital habits with tacit knowledge, remember your first time on a computer, or attempt to introduce a friend to new technology. Gestures took for granted, even the simple clicks of a mouse, were once new. If you have seen a child handle a smartphone, you know from the swipe to the selfie, digital technologies are designed to create tacit knowledge for users. Despite our extensive tacit knowledge of our digital devices, we still admire the expertise of a keyboard shortcut or expert rendering on a trackpad.

Tacit knowledge is a key method for comprehending both the digital and physical craft discourses, from student to expert to observer to critic. We propose digital-handicraft, a hybridized field of making, learning, and enactment, emerges from considering touch as a critical measure. In both craft and digital products, repeated and skilled touch gestures are critical in the creation of functional works. These gestures can be as simple as a mouse-click or screen-swipe but rely upon touch as the first measure of feedback, just as potters rely on the feeling of clay during skillful manipulation, touching it to assess plasticity, moisture, and surface. As we expand the importance of touch in physical and digital discourses, the line between the two become increasingly blurred, expanding the potential for interdisciplinary art, new pedagogical models, and alternative modes of organizing and resisting.

Touch is a unique modality of sensation, given its definite difference from sight and sound; touch feels touch. All senses are complicated psychologically, and these complications are discussed extensively through philosophy (Austin, 1962; ←24 | 25→Berkeley, 1709; Chisholm, 1957; Kant, 1781; O’Shaughnessy, 1989). Our perceptual experiences of touch are amplified and generated in both handmade production and digital environments. “Touch produces a communication or opening in touching through which we become sentient beings” (Vasseleu, 1999, p. 156). Touch becomes a way for us to understand ourselves, our environment, and the reality we inhabit. As researcher and lecturer Mika Elo writes:

It has made it possible to present touch as a sense that can serve cognitive interest by guaranteeing an immediate, hands-on touch with reality. This has led into the most primitive of the senses being regarded as the guarantor of optic intuition, promise of immediate experience and support of conscious thought. (Elo, 2012, p. 3)

Touch’s immediacy offers real-time and complex feedback allowing for intuitive interactions.

Feedback is information received about action, whether that action is a physical grasp or a gesture on the screen. Newer models of haptic technology, like the 3D Systems Haptic Devices, utilize small motors to “[apply] force feedback on the user’s hand” (3D Systems, 2019), so the visual rendering on the screen and the touch feedback work in harmony. Although largely unseen, design and interface development rely on these aspects (time, location, direction, modality, dynamics, and expression) to make a product that allows a free response from the user or maker (Wensveen, Djajadiningrat, & Overbeeke, 2004). This usability is integral in the pedagogical explorations of studio arts incorporating digital technologies.

Touch functions as feedback through haptic sensation, which is

[comprised of] the tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses [and] describes aspects of engagement that are qualitatively distinct from the capabilities of the visual sense …. The haptic sense renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin’s surface, and in external space. In enables the perception of weight, pressure, balance, temperature, vibration and presence. (Fisher, 1997, p. 2)

If tacit knowledge is a bodily understanding of a process or gesture, haptic knowledge is a bodily understanding of the world at large.

Haptic technologies emulate haptic sensations focusing on the sensual representation and recognition of vibration and presence. It becomes clear haptic feedback is key in understanding how touch influences both digital and physically crafted production. Given the psychological (and pedagogical) importance of haptic feedback, it is clear haptic technologies may be readily incorporated into the digital-handicraft practice.

Effortless rendering of scale and display in computer-generated imagery is standard, although incorporating touch into these interfaces requires a compartmentalized use of touch, often with a specific gesture or device. For example, Let’s Create! Pottery Lite (Version 1.63; Infinite Dreams, 2017) uses a pottery wheel ←25 | 26→simulation that responds and integrates your touch, illustrating the feedback of gestural movement in the virtual smooth, wet clay. The glazing and firing of a pot are as easy as ordering your 3D print online—technical knowledge of cone rating and temperature are obscured behind novelty and commodity.

Haptic technologies let us touch digital objects. The basic function of haptic interfaces is “used to measure the motion (position, velocity, and possibly acceleration) and the contact forces of the user’s entire body or arm, foot, or hand” (Kortum, 2008, p. 51). Virtual engagement is uncovered using prosthetics, namely force feedback joysticks, pen-based haptic interfaces, exoskeletal devices, and tactile and vibrotactile interfaces often designed for the fingertips. These prosthetics deepen the continuous interaction space between physical and virtual arenas, further embedding haptic realism within the digital-handicraft.

Touch in the digital is too often curtailed to the pointing of a finger. We advocate for the expansion of digital-handicraft to include the use of haptic interfaces, such as Novint Falcon (a device meant to replace the computer mouse), Ultrahaptics (which include a “pad” that controls ultrasound waves to suggest feedback mid-air), Foldaway (a palm-sized, origami haptic interface) or Tactus (a digital stylus that affects indentation, friction, and acoustics while writing); devices which allow for rendering of physical sensation between user and virtual space, such as force or friction, aligning the digital and handmade via touch.

In considering intuitive interaction with material to be central to craftwork, increased access to haptic technologies within a digital-handicraft position will serve to impart characteristics of craftwork onto digital work, rendering digital labor and products authentic and crafted, and their labor non-alienated and skilled. Intuitive interaction between user and materials offer embodied modes of making, offering new potential and intersections between previously separate discourses. With this in mind, we turn to define the digital-handicraft practice as one that uses haptic devices within a mixed reality framework, centering touch as a critical feedback measure within cultural production.