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,
