Introduction

This part focuses on interaction with a new type of materiality that blurs the boundaries of physical and digital materials in craft. Authors are closely examining how digitization gives rise to the new and changing situations in craft practice and the possible challenges and benefits it brings to embodied making and interaction with materials. As we can see from many of the chapters in this part, similar aspects of embodied cognition can be detected even in processes where interactions happen on a screen or via a robotic arm. Constraints, resistances, affordances, and feelings of flow can be experienced even when the body is not directly involved in a physical way. Practitioner-researcher Flemming Tvede Hansen is opening up this issue when transferring his craft skills to a programmable wire cutter tool in ceramics in Chapter 6 “Embodied Knowledge Integrated in Robotic Wire Cutting of Clay”. In Chapter 7 “Making, Playing, Crafting – Connecting Embodied Practices in Play, Game Design, and Hybrid Making”, digital media researchers Michael Nitsche and Jihan Sherman discuss the embodied interaction of gamers with the games they are playing, but extend the embodied interaction to the makers of the games that others play. The game designer’s experiences of envisioning and creating a space for embodied interaction in a digital world is a side of craft and design practice that has rarely been discussed.