research-article

"it's in your spinal cord, it's in your fingertips": practices of tools and craft in building software

Authors:

Jessica Lingel,

Tim ReganAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

Pages 295 - 304

https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531614

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with 12 software engineers, we investigate the relationship between developers and the tools they use to build code through the lens of craft. We analyze different conceptualizations of craft in accounts of software development, including craft as a process of building, craft as materiality, and craft as a community of practice. By working through these different facets of craft, we investigate tensions of perceiving coding work as, on the one hand, highly rational, and on the other, deeply personal and embodied. In working through these tensions of code as abstract and concrete, cerebral and intuitive, we note implications for craft, both as a theory relevant to computer human interaction, and for paradigms of education in computer science.

References

[1]

Abbate, J. Recoding gender: Women's changing participation in computing, MIT Press (2012).

Digital Library

[2]

Adamson, G. Thinking Through Craft, Berg (2007).

[3]

Alt, C. Objects of our affection: How object orientation made computers a medium. In E. Huhtamo & J. Parikka (Eds.) Media Archaeology, UC Berkeley Press (2011).

[4]

Bowker, G. and Star, S. L. Sorting Things Out, MIT Press (1999).

[5]

Bratich, J. Z. The digital touch: Craft-work as immaterial labour and ontological accumulation. Ephemera, 10, 3/4 (2010), 303--318.

[6]

Buxton, P. Hand, mind and hard drive. Crafts, May/June, (2003), 44--47.

[7]

Case, P. and Piñeiro, E. Aesthetics, performativity and resistance in the narratives of a computer programming community. Human Relations 59, 6 (2006), 168.

[8]

Chorianopoulous, K., Jaccheci, L., Salveson Nossum, A. Creative and open software engineering practices and tools in maker community projects. In Proc. EICS '12. ACM Press: New York, 333 - 334

Digital Library

[9]

Coleman, G. The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago (2005).

[10]

Coleman, E. G., & Golub, A. Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory, 8, 3 (2008), 255--277.

[11]

Computing at School, The Challenge. http://www. computingatschool.org.uk/index.php?id=the-challenge

[12]

Computing in School. http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Co ntent/education/policy/computing-in-schools/2012-0112-Computing-in-Schools.pdf

[13]

Crawford, M. The Case for Working With Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. Penguin (2009).

[14]

Curtis, C., Krasner, H. & Iscoe, N. A field study of the software design process for large systems. Communications of the ACM, 31 1 (1988), 1268--1287.

Digital Library

[15]

Dourish and Melissa Mazmanian, 'Media as Material: Information Representations as Material Foundations for Organizational Practice' (working paper presented at the Third International Symposium on Process Organization Studies, Corfu, Greece, June 2011).

[16]

Faulkner, W. 'Nuts and bolts and people': Gendertroubled engineer identities. Social Studies of Science, 37, 3 (2007), 331--356.

[17]

Fernaeus, Y., Jonsson, M., and Tholander, J. Revisiting the Jaquard loom: Threads of history and current patterns in HCI. In Proc. CHI 2012, ACM Press (2012), 1593--1602.

Digital Library

[18]

Gentner, D. R. & Grudin, J. Why good engineers (sometimes) create bad interfaces. In Proc. CHI '90, ACM Press (1990), 277--282.

Digital Library

[19]

Grudin, J. Groupware and social dynamics: 8 challenges for developers. Communications of the ACM 37 1 93105 (1994).

Digital Library

[20]

Hine, C. Virtual Ethnography, Sage (2000).

[21]

ICTs Programme Response. http://www.bcs.org /upload/pdf/ict-programmes-response-apr12.pdf

[22]

Kittler, F. A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press (2006).

[23]

Kleif, T. and Faulkner, W. "I'm no athlete {but} I can make this thing dance!" - Men's pleasures in technology. Science, Technology & Human Values, 28,2 (2003), 296--325.

[24]

Latour, B. Pandora's Hope: The Reality of Science Studies, Harvard University Press (1999).

[25]

Marwick, A. Status update: Celebrity, publicity and branding in web 2.0. Doctoral Dissertation, New York University (2010).

[26]

McCullough, M. Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, MIT Press (1996).

Digital Library

[27]

McKenzie, A. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality, Peter Lang, (2006).

[28]

Piñeiro, E. The aesthetics of code. On excellence in instrumental action. Doctoral Dissertation, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. (2003).

[29]

Poltrock, S. E. & Grudin, J. Organizational obstacles to interface design and development: Two participant observer studies. ACM Transactions on ComputerHuman Interaction 1 1 52--80.

Digital Library

[30]

Removing ICT Programmes of Study, Attainment Targets and statutory assessment arrangements http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ict-programmesresponse-apr12.pdf.

[31]

Risatti, H. A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression, University of North Carolina Press (2007).

[32]

Rosner, D. K. Mediated crafts: digital practices around creative handwork. In CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '10). ACM Press (2010), 2955--2958.

Digital Library

[33]

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

[34]

Spradley, J. The Ethnographic Interview, Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1979).

[35]

Strauss, A. L. and Corbin, J. M. Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications (1990).

[36]

Takhteyev, Y. Coding places: Software practice in a South American city. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press (2012).

Digital Library

[37]

Tannenbaum, J. G., Williams, A. M., Desjardins, A. Tanenbaum, K. Democratizing technology: Pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice. In Proc. CHI '13. ACM Press, 2603--2612.

Digital Library

[38]

Taylor, T. L. Life in Virtual Worlds: Plural Existence, Multimodalities, and Other Online Research Challenges. American Behavioral Scientist, 43, 3, (1999), 436--449.

[39]

Valentine, L., and Follett, G., Eds. Past, Present & Future Craft Practice, NMS Press (2010).

[40]

Walz, D. B., Elam, J. J. & Curtis, B. Inside a software design team: Knowledge acquisition, sharing and integration. Communications of the ACM 36 10, (1993), 63--77.

Digital Library

[41]

Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press (1998).

Cited By

Subbaraman BPeek N(2022)p5.fab: Direct Control of Digital Fabrication Machines from a Creative Coding EnvironmentProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533496(1148-1161)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533496
Jung JSteinberger TKing JAckerman M(2022)How Domain Experts Work with Data: Situating Data Science in the Practices and Settings of CraftworkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129056:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3512905
Sundelin AGonzalez-huerta JWnuk KGorschek T(2021)Towards an Anatomy of Software CraftsmanshipACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/346850431:1(1-49)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468504
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

"it's in your spinal cord, it's in your fingertips": practices of tools and craft in building software
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

Recommendations

The Matter of Tools: Designing, Using and Reflecting on New Tools for Emerging eTextile Craft Practices

Tools, as extensions of hand and mind, prescribe defining properties for a practice. We anchor our tools research within a case study of electronic textiles (eTextiles), combining textile materials and electronic and computational functionality. While ...
Troubling Innovation: Craft and Computing Across Boundaries
CHI EA '19: Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Craft practices such as needlework, ceramics, and woodworking have long informed and broadened the scope of HCI research. Whether through sewable microcontrollers or programs of small-scale production, they have helped widen the range of people and work ...
Music & Soundscapes of our everyday lives: Music & Sound-making, meaning-making, and self-making
Abstract
The aim of this professional Doctor of Creative Industries (DCI) Research Project was to investigate music-making practice and self as a practitioner in the process of creating and producing a DIY music artefact, specifically to investigate why I ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

February 2014

1600 pages

ISBN:9781450325400

DOI:10.1145/2531602

General Chairs:
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Wayne Lutters
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
,
Program Chairs:
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Madhu Reddy
Penn State University

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 February 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CSCW'14

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CSCW'14: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 15 - 19, 2014

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Acceptance Rates

CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
415
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)24
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Subbaraman BPeek N(2022)p5.fab: Direct Control of Digital Fabrication Machines from a Creative Coding EnvironmentProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533496(1148-1161)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533496
Jung JSteinberger TKing JAckerman M(2022)How Domain Experts Work with Data: Situating Data Science in the Practices and Settings of CraftworkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129056:CSCW1(1-29)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3512905
Sundelin AGonzalez-huerta JWnuk KGorschek T(2021)Towards an Anatomy of Software CraftsmanshipACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/346850431:1(1-49)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468504
Friske MWu SDevendorf LBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)AdaCADProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300575(1-13)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300575
Muller MLange IWang DPiorkowski DTsay JLiao QDugan CErickson TBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)How Data Science Workers Work with DataProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300356(1-15)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300356
Paine DLee C(2017)"Who Has Plots?"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31347201:CSCW(1-21)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3134720
Pérez - Bustos T(2017)Hilvanar tecnologías digitales y procesos de tejido o costura artesanal: una revisión crítica de prácticasSigno y Pensamiento10.11144//Javeriana.syp36-70.htdp36:70(14)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.11144//Javeriana.syp36-70.htdp
Lingel JKaye JDruin ALampe CMorris DHourcade J(2016)The Poetics of Socio-Technical SpaceProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858399(815-826)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858399
Snyder JShilton KAnderson S(2016)Observing the Materiality of Values in Information Systems ResearchProceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)10.1109/HICSS.2016.254(2017-2026)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2016.254

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents