Käsinkosketeltava digitaalisuus

Doing things by hand is a way of understanding and being in the world. Digitalisation both opens up new opportunities for doing by hand, and requires an updated experiential understanding of the world. We argue that programming provides hands-on experiences of the digital world and should be regarded as one of the handicrafts of the digital age. It can make the digital world graspable. We provide a short overview of digitalisation and describe three viewpoints to how programming as a handicraft can help to understand its aspects. We look at programming as a tool, a process and material, and draw analogues from the field of art to illustrate these viewpoints. We conclude with a discussion on how programming contributes to the understanding of the digitally-enabled free cooperation of people, and suggest programming as a handicraft to be part of digital citizenship skills.